1. Hero Header Slider

Let your creative side shine with the Tattoo Studio slider template. This template has a sleek and contemporary design that not only looks great but also adapts perfectly to any device, providing a smooth experience for everyone.

2. Product Carousel

Spice up your product showcase with the Full Width Product Carousel template, a cool slider that effortlessly combines style and practicality. By using the Carousel slider type, this template offers a visually stunning full-width layout, ideal for showcasing products and captivating your audience.

3. Blog Post Carousel

This kind of slider example lets you display your latest WordPress posts using your featured images as the background. What’s more, with Smart Slider 3 your post carousels will update dynamically each time you publish a new post. That means you can focus on your writing without having to worry about manually updating your slides in WordPress.

4. Logo carousel

Displaying the logos of the businesses you work with is a proven social proof technique, i.e. if Pizza Hut works with you, you must have a great business. With a logo carousel like this one, you can easily display client logos in a prominent space on your Homepage or About page. Plus, with infinity scrolling enabled, it will instantly catch your visitors’ eyes.

5. Instagram Carousel

Upgrade your website with the Instagram Carousel slider template and bring the vibes of your Instagram feed right to your website audience. This eye-catching slider effortlessly converts your Instagram posts into a captivating carousel, giving your website visitors a stylish way to dive into your content.

6. Fullscreen Slider

Take a cosmic adventure with our Undiscovered Universe slider template, created to take your website to new heights. Engage your visitors, by showcasing stunning visuals and enchanting animations that transport them to otherworldly places.

7. Landing Page

Treat your guests to the irresistible Bakery slider template, ideal for displaying the mouthwatering treats from your bakery. This demo website consists of five sliders that work together seamlessly, providing an engaging and informative experience for users.

8. Full-page Slider

Upgrade your content with the Office Exercises slider template, a lively presentation that blends captivating visuals, smooth animations, and easy-to-use navigation. Designed specifically for busy professionals, this slider is the ideal resource to showcase a healthier lifestyle and enhance your fitness content.

9. Shape Divider

The Animal Shelter template is a perfect blend of captivating design and visuals. Not only does it feature a simple slider type and full-width display, but it also incorporates subtle shape dividers, layer effects, and mesmerizing background animations.

10. Testimonial Slider

This testimonial slider features a minimalist design that is easy to read. The logos stand out and the photo helps visitors visualize who the quotes belong to. In addition, the navigation arrows and dots make it easy for visitors to scroll through and see other testimonials.

11. Groups of Sliders

Introduce your brand with ease using the Gibraltar template. It’s a simple and user-friendly solution that showcases a clean design and eye-catching layer animations. This template is flexible and can be used as a dynamic business portfolio or an engaging company website, providing various options to meet your requirements.

Wrapping Up

These are just some examples to show you what can easily be achieved with the right slider plugin and the right design. For more inspiration, check out the impressive sliders featured in Example Sliders, which include customizable sliders, blocks, and page templates.

Plus, you’ll be happy to know all of the examples featured in this article are available to customize with Smart Slider 3! Download the plugin for free today.

The post 11 Inspiring Slider Examples for Your Next Website appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Conclusion

Sliders are dead, long live sliders! But seriously, gone are the boring, ugly, and hard-to-use sliders that were around 10 years ago. Modern sliders using 2024 design techniques are stunning. They use optimized high-quality photography and elements that were just not possible to implement back in 2013, such as complex previews and advanced accessibility, layering, and animations.

I hope the examples above inspired you to explore what’s possible with homepage sliders. For more impressive homepage slider examples, don’t forget to check out our Example Sliders.

The post 12 Inspiring Examples of Stunning Modern Homepage Sliders appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Tips for Adding a Video Background to Your WordPress Site

Here are some tips to consider when creating a video background for your site:

• Make sure your video is good quality and has a decent resolution.
• Compress video for faster page loading.
• Use videos that are short in length. Looping video ensures it runs smoothly without having to pause for buffering.
• Ensure your video background has a fully responsive design so it looks great on all screens, including mobile devices.
• Set a fallback image background for visitors whose browsers don’t support video.
• Don’t autoplay with sound. Give visitors the option to enable sound.
• Create an overlay for any text you want to place over the top, and ensure they’re enough contrast so it can be easily read.

Lights, Camera, Action with WordPress Video Backgrounds

When you want to create a fullscreen background video for your header or simply add a YouTube video background to a section of a page, WordPress video backgrounds are really easy to implement.

There are many WordPress plugins that can help you do it, but you can’t go wrong with Smart Slider 3. It’s simple to set up and features many options for adding overlays, text and other elements on top of your video. This is especially useful for hero headers!

The post 3 Ways to Add a Stunning WordPress Video Background to Your Site appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/what-is-a-slider/ Wed, 10 Aug 2022 08:00:55 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=9831 Sliders. Carousels. Slideshows. No matter what you call them, sliders are an incredibly versatile design tool that allow you to showcase images, video, and other content beautifully and more effectively while maximizing the space on your website. Whether you need a simple way to display a slideshow of photos on an eCommerce or real estate […]

The post What is a Slider? The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Sliders appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Sliders. Carousels. Slideshows. No matter what you call them, sliders are an incredibly versatile design tool that allow you to showcase images, video, and other content beautifully and more effectively while maximizing the space on your website.

Whether you need a simple way to display a slideshow of photos on an eCommerce or real estate websites, or want a bold video header with calls-to-action, sliders can help you quickly grab your visitors’ attention.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into sliders, using examples from Smart Slider 3, a popular slider plugin for WordPress. We’ll explore what they are, how they’re used, the various kinds of sliders you can create, as well as all the different types of behaviors, elements, animations and effects you can include in your sliders.

What is a Slider?

The term slider is used for a design element, which is added to a WordPress page to display visual content. From classic image slideshows to modern fullscreen sliders, sliders come in all shapes and sizes. Using the right WordPress slider plugin, it’s easy to create your own sliders.

Designers love sliders for their flexibility and the visual elements that make it easy to tell a compelling story. Site owners, on the other hand, love them because they can promote multiple facets of a business within one website component and space. At their most basic, an image slideshow might contain a series of images, each with its own caption, like this example:

But in recent years, sliders have evolved to provide greater functionality and feature beyond simple images and text. Now, you can add video, use layers to combine images, text, and buttons, and even include a mix of elements and animations — all within the same slider.

Let’s take a look at a few modern examples.

Amazon uses sliders liberally throughout its site to promote its products. On the homepage, there’s a slider with featured products, as well as several small sliders below with best sellers.

In this example, Airbnb uses a slider on its homepage to display cities were people can book short stay accommodation around the world:

And in this more complex example, Lonely Planet uses a fullscreen homepage slider incorporating navigation and text previews to showcase its latest featured articles:

These are just some of the big brands using sliders to showcase their best content while maximizing all-important screen space.

But it’s not just big brands using sliders. Sliders are easy to add to any WordPress site, and there are plenty of options out there, particularly for WordPress users.

How Do Sliders Work with WordPress?

Adding sliders to your WordPress site is as easy as installing and activating a plugin, and then using the provided visual builder to design your slider.

There are many WordPress slider plugins available, which allow you to create sliders and add them to any page or post on your site. You can download free slider plugins from WordPress.org. Below, you’ll see Smart Slider 3 is the highest rated slider plugin for WordPress:

There are also many premium slider plugins available for WordPress, such as Smart Slider 3 Pro and Revolution Slider, the latter of which is packaged with many ThemeForest themes.

Typically, free slider plugins offer only basic features, such as the ability to create image sliders with captions and simple transitions. When you upgrade to a premium slider plugin, you can start building more complex sliders using layers, images, text, videos, CTAs, animations, and more.

Types of Sliders

There are several different types of slider, each of which provides the structure for a slider, on top of which you can add other elements. These are the types of sliders you will find in Smart Slider 3:

• Standard – Also known as a slideshow, this type of slider enables you to display several images, one at a time.
• Carousel – This type of slider displays two or more images at a time, which users can cycle through.
• Showcase – This type of slider lets you put the focus on one image, but also give a sneak peek at other images in the series.
• Block – A content block features just one slide but can include many different elements (text, image, video, etc), animations and effects.

Types of Slider Layouts

In addition to slider types, there are different slider layouts that determine how a slider type will look on a web page.

• Boxed – This is the most typical type of layout you’ll come across on the web, such as an on eCommerce site displaying product items. It makes the slider fit into its container.
• Full width – Display a slider across the entire width of a page.
• Full page – This fullscreen layout fills the entire page above-the-fold.

Working with Slider Layers

Free slider plugins (with the exception of Smart Slider 3) allow you to create only basic slideshows using images and text. Premium slider plugins, on the other hand, let you design to your heart’s content with layers.

Layers are basically content building block that you can add to sliders to create more functional, beautiful, and complex designs. Similarly, Photoshop and other image editing programs use layers to enable users to stack and work with different types of content.

The most basic layers you’ll find in premium slider plugins include: Headings, Text, Images, Buttons and Videos (YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted).

Some premium and advanced sliders may also offer other types of content layers, such as: Icons, Lists, Captions, Image boxes (and image areas), Transitions, Progress bars, Counters (and circle counters), Audio, Text areas and iFrame.

The best way to fully understand how layers work is to see them in action. Check out the video below to see how layers work in the free version of Slider Slider 3.

Adding Animations and Effects to Sliders

You’re probably familiar with the default right to left slide background animation that many images slideshows use when transitioning through images. But what’s exciting about working with sliders is that there are many more awesome animations and effects you can use to add both bold and subtle effects to your website.

Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, rotate, zoom, or have your images metaphorically explode, there are dozens of different background animations you can use for transitions between each slide.

Layer Animations

Similar to background animations, layer animations enabled you to animate particular layers in your slider, such as the button animation below.

Text Animations

With text animations you can animate your words and bring text to life as a chain of lines, words, or characters.

Ken Burns Effect

Make your slides pop with this elegant zooming and panning Ken Burns effect, invented for film. A simple way to give your images the illusion of motion.

Parallax

Add depth to your sliders—or, at least, the illusion of it—with parallax. Parallax images move at different speeds and create an optical illusion of depth.

Animated shape divider

Add moving curves, clouds, and diagonal shapes to your sliders with an animated shape divider effect.

Particle effect

Stunning yet deceptively simple. Using the particle effect allows you to add moving shapes and lines, dots, triangles, and polygons that follow the cursor

Creating Sliders: Features and Functionality to Look Out for When Choosing a WordPress Slider Plugin

Now that you’ve got a basic understanding of the different types and behaviors of sliders, as well as layers, animations, and effects, it’s time to look at some of the advanced features you can expect to see in reputable WordPress slider plugins.

From different types of content and dynamic elements to performance and optimization capabilities, these are the features you should look out for when choosing a quality slider plugin.

Visual Editor

Every good slider plugin should come with a visual editor that allows you to design each individual slide, much like how you would with Photoshop and other image editing programs.

Visual editor allows you to drag-and-drop layers, change fonts, sizes, colors, add animations and effects, and generally manipulate the content in your slides to look exactly how you want.

Layers and Customization

Imagine if Photoshop didn’t have layers? It would be difficult to design and edit images, right? Surprisingly, many slider plugins don’t use layers. Without them, you’re severely limited in how you can design your plugins.

Layers allow you to create content-rich sliders, which might have various images, text, video, and other elements layered together to form one interactive slide.

When choosing a slider plugin, make sure it includes the most basic layers (headings, text, images, video, and buttons), as well as any advanced content you might need, such as icons, audio, lists, and counters.

Live Preview

Like any software, live preview allows you to quickly see every change you make in real-time. For example, after updating an image or adding a text layer or transition, you can click ‘Preview’ to quickly preview your changes and see what your slider looks like with all over your layers, animations and effects working together.

Dynamic Content

You aren’t limited to adding just static images, video, and text to your slides. Some slider plugins, like Smart Slider 3, allow you to populate slides with dynamic content, such as WordPress and Joomla blog posts, YouTube playlists, and even products from your WooCommerce site.

This means you can dynamically display content, such as your eCommerce store’s best-selling products, your latest blog posts, or even new video additions to your YouTube channel.

Page Builder Compatible

If you’ve built your site using a page builder, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Site Origin or WP Bakery Page Builder, be sure to check that any slider plugin you choose is compatible.

Responsive Design

Ensuring that your site design is responsive is crucial now that Google has moved to mobile-first indexing. So choose a slider plugin that provides responsive design out-of-the-box.

Some sliders, like Smart Slider 3, provide device-specific settings for desktop, tablet and mobile. This means your sliders will automatically adjust for different devices. You can choose to enable features like tilt and swipe, or simply turn off sliders for particular devices.

Support and Updates

Premium slider plugins should always come with priority support, so if you run into any issues you can get in touch for help. Support generally doesn’t come with free slider plugins, though you can use the WordPress Support Forums if you have any questions.

Keeping your slider plugin up-to-date is also important for security and performance, and so you can upgrade to receive new features.

Speed and Performance

There’s a common perception that sliders negatively impact website performance. Often, people add images to sliders that are too big or haven’t been optimized. So if a slider plugin further impacts performance, it’s a double whammy for page load speed.

It’s important that your slides load immediately but don’t slow down the loading of your pages, so look out for slider plugins that offer image optimization such as generating smaller images for tablet and mobile visitors and converting the images to WebP for faster load time. The ability to lazy load some of the images is another great feature to have. Both of these techniques will help your slides load quickly.

SEO-Friendly

When you’re adding different types of content such as images and video to your sliders, it makes sense to leverage it for SEO, right? So when choosing a slider plugin, make sure it’s been designed with SEO in mind and its HTML structure follow SEO best practice. This will ensure your individual slides—along with the alt text you have entered for your content—ranks in search.

Developer-Friendly

If you want even more control over the design of your slides, look for a slider plugin that’s developer-friendly and allows for custom code within slides, but also allows you to edit external files for customizations like animations and effects.

Conclusion

Now that you learned all there is to know about sliders and how they work with WordPress, you’re ready to start creating your own! As I mentioned above, there are some great free options, but I’d highly recommend starting out with Smart Slider 3, which you can download from WordPress.org.

Smart Slider 3 comes with loads of features and options (including everything mentioned in this article and more). Check out these stunning slider examples and download Smart Slider 3 for free to get started.

The post What is a Slider? The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Sliders appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

What is a Vertical Slider?

So what exactly is a vertical slider? And how do they move?

It can be difficult at first to understand wrap your head around what a vertical slider is with just words, it’s something you have to see, and we’ll go through some examples below.

1. Simple Vertical Slider Transitions

You might be thinking they’re a type of carousel with images that are displayed from top to bottom and, yes, that’s one type of vertical slideshow.

With Smart Slider 3, for example, you can choose a variety of different vertical transitions, including:

• Fixed to bottom
• Parallax to bottom
• Curtain to top
• Horizontal spin to bottom
• Spinning cuboid to bottom

2. Fullsize Vertical Sliders

When you take that simple idea and then take it to the next level, you get an impressive fullsize page image slider that changes slides as you scroll down the page. It’s a visually stunning way to display sections of your page in an engaging way that will keep your visitors on the page, helping to reduce your bounce rate.

What’s more, with Smart Slider 3 you can add multiple layers to your slides, including text, headers, buttons and navigation indicators (those three dots to the right of the slider above).

3. Dynamically Generated Vertical Sliders

If you regularly publish content and you’re looking for a new way to design your blog, why not use a vertical slideshow? With a WordPress plugin that enables you to dynamically generate content, such as Smart Slider 3, you can pull fresh directly content from sources like your WordPress blog, YouTube, and more.

That means you can great your dynamic slider once and it will always automatically display your latest posts. No more manually updating slides!

4. Split Screen Vertical Sliders

One of the more impressive types of vertical slider is the split-screen transition. As the user scrolls down the page, each side of the screen moves in independent sections in opposite directions, sliding to revealing new content.

Using this kind of split-vertical web design is simple to implement with Smart Slider 3, and could give your website the visual boost it needs to engage visitors.

5. Product Showcase Slider

Looking for a unique way to design the landing page for your new app? Using fullscreen vertical page transitions, you can keep the focus on your most important content and stop visitors from mindlessly scrolling down the page.

When visitors can only scroll one section at a time, it enables you to highlight certain content and guide visitors to click on call-to-action buttons. Plus, it looks damn cool, right?

6. Group Vertical Slideshow

Vertical sliders can be as simple or as complex in design as you want them to be. With Smart Slider 3, you can add as many layers and elements as you want to your individual slides, which can help you create engaging sliders that look less like sliders and more like dynamic pages.

Take the Conference Group slider above, for example. It features a header and text, together with buttons, thumbnail navigations, background images with a subtle Ken Burns effect, along with sections for conference information as a further CTA for booking your seat.

Wrapping Up

And there you have it, a quick guide to vertical sliders. Whether you’re thinking about adding vertical transitions to your WordPress website or landing page, a vertical slider can add an interactive element to your site that is more engaging and eye-catching than a simple static site.

Ready to start playing with vertical sliders? With Smart Slider 3, you can create all of the examples in this post. If you have any questions about how to create vertical sliding transitions, leave a comment below!

The post What is a Vertical Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/how-to-add-a-wordpress-slideshow/ Tue, 26 Jul 2022 19:20:37 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=7436 When you’ve spent so much time creating a beautiful website, you want visitors to actually stick around and spend time interacting with your content, right? But in today’s busy world of instant gratification, you’ve got just 3 seconds to grab your site visitors’ attention. This is why it’s so important to use design techniques that […]

The post How to Add a WordPress Slideshow to Your Website appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> When you’ve spent so much time creating a beautiful website, you want visitors to actually stick around and spend time interacting with your content, right? But in today’s busy world of instant gratification, you’ve got just 3 seconds to grab your site visitors’ attention.

This is why it’s so important to use design techniques that draw immediate attention to your most important information when a person lands on your website. One such technique is WordPress slideshows. Let’s take a look at how WordPress slideshows work and how you can easily add one to your website.

What is a WordPress Slideshow?

A WordPress slideshow or WordPress slider is a design feature that allows you showcase images, video and other content more effectively in a confined space on your site. You can find many WordPress slider plugins to create sliders for your WordPress site.

For example, you might use a slideshow on your homepage to promote products and holiday sales (if you run an eCommerce store), or a smaller slider on your “About” page to display customer or client testimonials. Whether you want a simple image slideshow, a fullscreen video slideshow, or a stunning slideshow with a mix of photography and video for added visual impact, WordPress slideshows can be customized exactly how you like.

How to create a WordPress slideshow?

To get started creating your WordPress slideshow, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress site and click Plugins in the admin sidebar. At the top of the page, click “Add New” and search the plugin directory for “Smart Slider 3.”
2. Click Install Now and then activate the plugin.
3. Once installed and activated, you’ll see a new menu item appear in the sidebar. Click “Smart Slider.”

Smart Slider 3 is one of the most popular tools for creating slideshows for WordPress websites. It comes with tons of stunning preset designs, which you can customize to suit your own website’s style and branding. You can add text, headings, call-to-action buttons, video, and even pull in WordPress posts. There really is no limit to what you can do with a WordPress slideshow – the options are endless.

Why Use WordPress Slideshows?

Slideshows have become ubiquitous across the web – and for good reason. They are simple to set up, can be customized however you like, and allow you to showcase your most important content more effectively in a small space.

Designers love them for their flexibility, making it easy to tell a compelling story through slides, using text, images, video, and other creative design elements. Done right, WordPress slideshows can add visual punch to any website.

Here are just a few ways you can WordPress slideshows to better showcase your content.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

1. Highlighting New Content

Large amounts of content on a web page can be overwhelming for people who are visiting your site for the first time. But with WordPress slideshows, you can display your content into more management chunks, allowing visitors to more easily understand your key messages.

Take Microsoft, for example, which uses a slider at the top of its homepage to showcase it’s latest products. Sliders are great for showcasing an ever-changing lineup of new and popular products, especially because they’re easy to update.

2. Photo Galleries

WordPress slideshows are perfect for photo galleries. Whether you have two images or 10, a slideshow enables you to display all of your images in sequence. It’s a great way to let site visitors scroll through images in their own time. Alternatively, you can enable the slider autoplay so your images automatically change slides without user intervention.

Check out how National Geographic uses slideshows as part of its site feed to display photographed submitted from around the world, in this case, the Arctic.

3. Online portfolios

Because WordPress slideshows are suited to showcasing visual content, they are oft used by creatives, photographers, designers and artists to display work in their online portfolios. In this instance, slideshows allow potential clients to easily scroll through a person’s visual work.

4. Ecommerce

Slideshows are ideal for showcasing products in an online store, whether you want to highlight new product lines, sale items, or holiday specials. But what’s really great about WordPress slideshows is that they allow customers on smaller devices like mobile phones to easily scroll through mobile content.

For example, Friend of Franki, a WooCommerce site, display high-resolution images of its clothing throughout the desktop version of its site. But when you switch to a tablet of mobile devices, the images are displayed as WordPress slideshows.

5. Testimonials

Sliders aren’t just for images and videos – they’re a great visual device for communicating words, too. A hugely popular use of WordPress slideshows is for displaying client and customer testimonials. Using a slideshow, you can display multiple testimonials in a section of your homepage or any other page on your site. Plus, with autoplay enabled, slideshows provide an eye-catching way to draw a potential client or customer’s eye to your social proof.

Here, Help Scout uses a slideshow to show off positive testimonials and hopefully catch the eye of potential customers.

How to Add WordPress Slideshows to Your Website

The easiest way to add a WordPress slideshow to your site is with Smart Slider 3. With over 900,000 active installs and 969 glowing 5-star reviews, it’s one of the most popular slider plugins for WordPress.

First, you should install Smart Slider 3. You should see the Smart Slider 3 dashboard, which looks like this:

If you have a vision for your slideshow, it’s easy to create one from scratch. Alternatively, you can import a pre-designed WordPress slideshow, which you can customize to suit your website. To build a new slider, click the green New Project and upload a new image to get started.

Customizing a Pre-Built WordPress Slideshow

If customizing an existing WordPress slideshow is more up your alley, click on Template Library, where you can choose from a collection of 180+ pre-designed slideshows.

Have a scroll through the designs and choose the one that best reflects what you need for your site – some designs are best-suited to headers, while others are perfect for showcasing blog posts or products.

Hover over the design you like and click Import to automatically import it to your site. Once imported, click the slide you want to edit and the content editor will load.

There are tons of customizable settings so you can control everything from headings and text to images, transition effect, call-to-action buttons and more. You can access all of these settings in the sidebar to the left of the content editor.

When you click on a block of text – or any other element of your slide – a modal will appear where you can control everything from fonts and sizes to colors, letter-spacing and even animations. There are so many options to play with.

Once you’ve edited your slide to suit your website, click Save in the top-right of the page. And if you want to add or edit your existing WordPress slideshow, it’s super easy. From the dashboard for your slideshow, you can drag-and-drop to rearrange slides, duplicate slides with one click, and remove any you no longer need. If you want, you can even mix it up with video slides and WordPress posts.

There are so many options to choose from. Plus, once you get started experimenting with animations and transitions, the possibilities are endless!

Ready to Create Your Own Stunning WordPress Slideshow?

With so many beautiful options, there is a slideshow design for everyone. Ready to create your own? With Smart Slider 3, you can get started creating beautiful WordPress slideshows for yourself. Checking out these stunning slideshow examples and download Smart Slider 3 for free to get started.

The post How to Add a WordPress Slideshow to Your Website appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

For example, with Smart Slider 3 you can generate dynamic content from a range of different sources, including:

• WordPress web pages, posts, and custom post types
• WooCommerce products
• The Events Calendar
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• RSS

Dynamic sliders are just that—dynamic. That means you only have to create your slider once with a WordPress plugin and the content displayed will always be automatically updated for you. You can set and forget. It also means you can focus on publishing great content or finding the best products for your online store without having to worry about updating your slider.

4 Impressive Examples of Dynamic Sliders

Let’s take a look at some examples of dynamic sliders to inspire your next project.

1. Dynamic Post Slider

This kind of dynamic slider lets you display your latest WordPress posts using your featured images as the background thumbnail. When you choose to dynamically generate content from your WordPress blog or Joomla articles, it means when a visitor land on your site the slider will automatically display your latest posts. The first slide will show your newest post. That means you can focus on publishing great content without having to worry about manually updating your slider.

2. Dynamic Image Slider

Dynamic sliders are ideal for photographers, designers, and creatives who have image-heavy websites. With a dynamic slider, you can select a specific folder in the slide settings as the source of images for your slider. That means when you add new images or remove some, your slider will automatically update to pull only images that are saved in the folder.

3. WooCommerce Product Slider

Dynamic product carousels are a popular design element used by ecommerce sites because they let you display multiple product items in a confined space. For example, Amazon users several different sliders to display every product on its homepage. With Smart Slider 3, you can create dynamic sliders that automatically update product sliders with items from your WooCommerce store. Best of all, your slider will look and work great on mobile devices, ensuring shoppers can easily swipe through your products.

4. YouTube Slider

A YouTube slider is a great way to make a visual impact on your visitors with a video player from your YouTube channel. What’s great about dynamically generating content from YouTube is that you don’t need to upload video to your website — you can host it on YouTube and pull it directly from your account. All you need to do is to copy your video’s link or the video ID, and in Smart Slider 3 you can easily create a nice looking, fully responsive YouTube slider for free.

How to Create a Dynamic Slider with Smart Slider 3

Creating a dynamically changing slider is easy with Smart Slider 3. Just follow this 5-step guide and create your own dynamic slideshow.

1. Create a dynamic slide

If you have an existing slider or you’ve created a new one, you can add a dynamic slide to them. This slide will automatically refresh if your source has a new content. You should set the number of how many dynamic slides you want to display in the slider, and set up the generator.

2. Set up your generator

You can choose from a lot of sources. In the free version of Smart Slider 3 you can create a Post slider from your WordPress posts or Joomla articles but if you have the Pro version, you can choose from 20 sources in WordPress and 27 sources in Joomla.

3. Design your slider

If you want to create a unique slider, now you can create your own design. Also in Smart Slider 3, you can import more predefined slider examples which you can use in your dynamic slide. All you need is to copy the layout and paste it into your dynamic slide.

4. Insert variable

If you want to have dynamically changing content, you should set variables. Where you don’t use variables, you will have a static layer.

5. Publish the slider

Finally, you can publish your slider, use its shortcode or create a Gutenberg block. And your slider will appear in the front end, and it will automatically refresh.

Wrapping Up

When you want to create a slider that features your latest content, you can’t go wrong with a dynamic slider plugin. Best of all, they’re really easy to implement with Smart Slider 3. All you need to do is select your dynamic generator source and use the provided shortcode to add your slider to your site.

I hope this guide has helped you learn more about dynamic sliders. If you have any questions about how to create a responsive slider that generates content dynamically with Smart Slider 3, leave a comment below!

The post How to Create Stunning Dynamic Sliders in WordPress appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Why Use Smart Slider Free?

The free version of Smart Slider is one of the most feature-packed plugins I’ve ever come across in the WordPress repository. It’s amazing for the price you pay, which is absolutely nothing! It has exploded in popularity over the past year, with 20,000 new active installs in just the past month.

So what makes Smart Slider so special? For one thing, it offers just the right number of features so you can create beautiful sliders with complex designs, all without feeling forced to upgrade for something as simple as layers (layers are included, unlike some other free slider plugins).

So let’s take a look at the features that come with the free version of Smart Slider.

Default and Absolute layers

There are two different visual layer positions in Smart Slider: Default and Absolute.

Using Default layers you can build much like a page builder. You can quickly build your slides using columns and rows for uniformity, and a clean design that’s fully responsive.

Absolute layers give you the freedom to work with layers unobstructed, much like you would with popular image editing tools such as Photoshop. With Smart Slider, you can drag and drop your layers and position them anywhere on your slides, even on top of each other for dynamic effects.

Layers

Create unique designs with six different layers: image, heading, text, button, Vimeo, and YouTube. What’s great about Smart Slider is that you can place your layers anywhere on your slides, so you can have text on top of images and position your layers how you like.

Image optimization

Smart Slider free can optimize your images by resizing them to the size of the slider. This reduces your page loading time, so you can serve content to your visitors faster.

Slide Library

The Slide Library provides several pre-made slides in light and dark skins to help kickstart your work. You can import slides directly into the Slide editor and start customizing them with your own content.

Page Builder Support

Smart Slider works flawlessly with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Page Builder by Site Origin, and WP Bakery Page Builder, and Gutenberg.

Responsive and Touch-Friendly

Ensuring that your site design is responsive is crucial now that Google has moved to mobile-first indexing. With Smart Slider, your sliders will automatically adjust for different devices.

This means your sliders can be enjoyed on any device, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop. You can choose to enable features like swipe, or simply turn off sliders for particular devices.

Dynamic Slides

You aren’t limited to adding just static images, video, and text to your slides. With Smart Slider, you can populate your slides with dynamic content, such as WordPress posts.

For example, you could pull in your latest blog posts and display them on your homepage to promote your recent article.

Customizable Controls

There’s a range of different navigational controls you can add to your sliders, including arrows, bullets, and thumbnails. You can also add text bars, shadows, and autoplay your sliders.

Slide Background Animations

Smart Slider comes with nine super smooth background animations, which you can customize to change the duration and speed.

Why Use Smart Slider Pro?

The free version of Smart Slider is so popular and feature-rich that you might be wondering, “Should I buy the Pro version?”

While the free version lets you create beautiful sliders with ease, the Pro version offers a huge stack of additional features to help you build sliders with more complex designs, including more layers, more slider types, and more animations and effects.

Plus, with the Pro version, you get access to the latest updates and support. This means you’ll always have the most secure version of Smart Slider, and if you ever need any help, it’s just a ticket away. It’s worth pointing out that the free version of Smart Slider has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating — and the Pro version has even faster access to support.

So let’s take a look at the additional features available in Smart Slider Pro.

More Slides

The Slide Library comes with 100+ pre-designed sliders for everything from hero sliders and product carousels to magazine layouts, app showcases and testimonial sliders. No matter what kind of design your site has, there a slide you can import and customize to suit your needs.

More Layers

Enhance your sliders with the full collection of 21 layer types, which you can use to create. For instance, you can add MP4 videos to your slides instead of just Youtube or Vimeo. You can create animated or highlighted heading layers to deliver your message in the most effective way.

More Slider Types

There are three additional slider types: Carousel, Block and Showcase. You can also create Full Page sliders, which fill the browser viewport.

More Dynamic Generators

With the Pro version you can populate your slides with content from even more sources — 32 sources, in fact — including WordPress posts, WooCommerce products, YouTube, Dribbble, Pinterest, and NextGEN Gallery.

You can even pull in events from popular plugins like All-in-One Event Calendar, Events Manager, and The Events Calendar.

More Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, zoom, rotate or explode your slides, with the Pro version you get access to the full collection of 70+ background animations. These animations let you control the transitions between each of your slides.

Layer Animation Builder

Smart Slider Pro features a powerful layer animation system that enables you to create motion and transitions between your layers.

Live Timeline

Every layer animation appears on an interactive visual timeline, where the details can be changed easily.

Tons of Extra Expert Settings

When you upgrade to Pro, you unlock the full range of functionality available in the plugin, including:

• Lazy loading – Improve your website’s loading speed by loading less images on page load.
• Lightbox option – Enable images and videos to display in a lightbox for a better user experience, and save space on your webpage.
• Layer animation – Introduce or hide your layers in an exciting way with a cool layer animation.
• Actions and events –Trigger layer animations using custom events in response to actions like mouse clicks or mouse enter events.
• SEO-friendly – The HTML structure ensures the best results for search engines.
• Device Specific Options – Set custom slider size or slide background image to provide the best experience for all users.
• New navigational controls – Tweak new arrows, bullets and thumbnails with new customization options.
• Text animation – Text animation gives you the opportunity to animate the text itself by words or characters.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

How Much is Smart Slider Pro?

There are three different pro pricing options:

When you purchase a license, it’s a one-off payment and you get lifetime updates and support, as well as access to all Pro features.

Smart Slider Pro also offers a handy 14-day money back guarantee if you decide it’s not for you and you want to return to using the free version.

Conclusion

So which version of Smart Slider is the right one for you — Free or Pro?

If you want to create a simple image slideshow, a full width slider that features dynamically generated content from your blog posts, a video slider, or thumbnail slider, then Smart Slider Free is the right option for you.

If you want to create sliders with more complex designs, including layer and background animations and effects, app showcases, fullpage blocks, or dynamically pull in video, social media, ecommerce products, and other content, then Smart Slider Pro will best fit your needs.

If you have any questions about the free and Pro versions, let us know in the comments below!

The post Smart Slider Free vs Pro: Which One Should You Pick? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

1. Default and Absolute layers

There are two different visual ways in Smart Slider 3 to create content: using Default and Absolute layers. It’s these innovative editing options that set this plugin apart from the competition and help make it the easiest to use slider plugin for WordPress.

Working with Default layers is like working with a page builder. You can use columns and rows to quickly build your slides, and with a clean design that’s fully responsive.

Working with Absolute layers, you have the freedom to work with layers unobstructed, much like you would in Photoshop. You can place your layers anywhere you like and even position them on top of each other to create stunning sliders with dynamic effects.

2. Rich Layers

Imagine if Photoshop didn’t have layers. It would be difficult to design and edit images, right? Surprisingly, many slider plugins don’t offer layers, which severely limits what you can do with your slider designs.

Not Smart Slider 3, though — it’s the most advanced slider plugin when it comes to layers, boasting 21 different layers, which you can use to create a professional and good-looking layer slider.

3. Extensive Slide library

Whether you’re time poor, have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to design, or just need a kick-start with designing your slides, Smart Slider 3 Pro comes with a stack of beautifully designed templates that you can customize with your own content.

The Slide Library comes with 100+ pre-designed slides for everything from product sliders and hero headers to magazine layouts, and testimonials.

4. Impressive Template Collection

In addition to the extensive Slide Library, Smart Slider 3 Pro also has a huge collection of professionally designed slider templates, which you can also browse and import. The template collection includes customizable slider, block, and page templates.

Once you’ve imported a template, you can change the colors, fonts, layers and more to suit your website. If you’re new to Smart Slider 3 Pro, playing with the design of a demo template slider is a great way to learn how the plugin works — and what it’s capable of.

I highly recommend checking out the plugin’s collection of example sliders so you can get a feel for what you can build with Smart Slider 3 Pro.

5. Dynamic Generators

One of Smart Slider 3 Pro’s most useful features is its ability to pull in dynamic content from loads of different sources — 32 sources, in fact — including WordPress posts, WooCommerce products, YouTube, Dribbble, Pinterest and more.

How is this feature useful? Say you wanted to auto-populate your sliders with videos from your YouTube channel, images from your Dribbble portfolio, or photos from your Flickr account. Also you can create a Post slider or a Product slider, which show your latest post or product, and can update itself automatically. You could do all this with Smart Slider 3 Pro.

6. Animations and Effects

Sliders have evolved far beyond the simple image sliders and transitions that dominated websites 10 years ago. What’s exciting about working with sliders now is that there are awesome animations and effects you can use to add both bold and subtle elements to your site.

Here are some of the animations and effects you’ll find in Smart Slider 3 Pro:

Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, zoom, rotate or explode your slides, there are 70+ background animations you can use for the transitions between each slide.

Layer Animations

Similar to background animations, layer animations let you animate the individual layers of your slides which you can cheer up your slider.

Text Animations

With text animations, you can bring your words to life by animating lines, words, or individual characters. A split text animation on your heading layer, or the animated heading attracts the eye and catch the visitor’s attention.

Parallax Effect

Add depth to your sliders — or, at least, the illusion of it — with parallax effect. With parallax enabled, your slides will move at different speeds, creating an optical illusion of depth.

Animated Shape Divider

Add moving curves, clouds, and diagonal shapes to your sliders with the animated shape divider.

Ken Burns Effect

Make your sliders “pop” with this elegant zooming and panning Ken Burns effect, which was originally invented for film. It’s a simple way to give your static images the illusion of motion.

Particle Effect

This effect is stunning yet deceptively simple. The particle effect adds moving shapes and lines, dots, triangles, and polygons that follow the cursor.

7. Responsive Options

With Smart Slider 3 you can create responsive WordPress sliders, so you slider will automatically adjust for different devices. Even the free version of Smart Slider 3 is fully responsive and has a lot of device specific settings. You can set the font sizes to lower or bigger on each device, or set different padding or margins, and wrap after columns value.

Smart Slider 3 Pro features you more responsive options than most of slider plugins. You can define device specific slider sizes, and you can use a different slide background image for desktop, tablet or mobile.

8. Speed and performance

There’s a common misconception that sliders are resource-hungry and negatively impact site performance. While some sliders may well slow down your site, you can rest assured that Smart Slider 3 Pro won’t.

It comes with image optimization (you can optimize and preload images to improve your website’s loading speed), lazy loading and — impressively — script optimization, which boasts efficient code, asynchronous loading, and minification. These features alone are more than you’ll find in any other slider plugin.

9. Developer-Friendly

Smart Slider 3 Pro is intuitive enough for beginners to use, but is also packed with features for developers. In the Pro version you get access to a bunch of advanced options, giving you even more control over your slides.

10. Support and Updates

Last, but not least, one of the best features of Smart Slider 3 is the folks who build and support it. The team at Smart Slider 3 put their heart and soul into this plugin and it shows — from the regular updates to the friendly customer support, you can trust that when you buy this plugin, you’ll be well looked after.

The free version of Smart Slider 3 has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating at WordPress.org. When you scroll through the latest reviews, you can see how much people really love this plugin! When you buy the Pro version, you can be confident that you’ll get even better, faster support.

Conclusion

Smart Slider 3 Pro is the most feature-rich slider plugin for WordPress. But it’s more than just a slider plugin — it’s a visual builder that lets you create sliders, blocks, app showcases, and other page elements for a truly dynamic website.

If you want a slider plugin that’s feature-rich, user-friendly, and optimized for performance, Smart Slider 3 Pro is a popular and versatile option that’s worth checking out.

The post Top 10 Features of Smart Slider 3 Pro appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/wordpress-logo-slider/ Sun, 26 Apr 2020 12:00:56 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=15351 Thinking about adding a WordPress logo slider to your site? If there’s one thing successful businesses have in common, it’s the use of customer logos on their sites. Logos inspire trust in your brand. Essentially, you’re saying to potential customers, “trust us because they these guys did!” With your own WordPress logo slider, you can […]

The post How to Create a Stunning WordPress Logo Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Thinking about adding a WordPress logo slider to your site? If there’s one thing successful businesses have in common, it’s the use of customer logos on their sites. Logos inspire trust in your brand. Essentially, you’re saying to potential customers, “trust us because they these guys did!”

With your own WordPress logo slider, you can easily showcase client, customer, sponsor, or partner logos on your site. In this post, we’ll take a look at what WordPress logo sliders are, the benefits you can expect when you add one to your site, and how to get started creating one with Smart Slider 3.

What is a WordPress Logo Slider?

A WordPress logo slider, also known as a logo carousel, lets you display logos on your site. This makes it easy for customers to see what brands are you associated with your business. For example, WP Engine uses a logo slider to display some of the big name customers it works with:

WordPress logo sliders are one of the best ways to display logos because you can:

• Display as many logos as you want. Whether you have two or 20 logos, you can display them all with a logo slider since space isn’t a concern.
• Display logos responsively. With a logo slider, you can keep your logos organized and ensure your design looks great on any device.
• Set manual or auto-scroll. You can set your WordPress logo slider to scroll automatically (like the WP Engine example above), or let your visitors advance through logos manually using arrows, dots, or swipes.
• Control other settings. There are many other design and configuration settings you can control, including the size of your logo slider, any animations, responsive design, and navigation.

Why Use a WordPress Logo Slider?

There’s one simple reason why so many brands display logos on their site: logos inspire trust and credibility in your business.

Logos offer quick visual brand recognition. When skeptical visitors see well-known logos on your site, their guard comes down. It’s like walking into a party and seeing someone you know — you immediately think, “Okay, these people are cool!”

Often, logos will impress your customers — and the bigger the businesses, the better. If you’ve worked with Google or Apple, why wouldn’t you want to tell potential customers about it?

Best Practice Tips for Using a WordPress Logo Slider

Before you dive into creating a WordPress logo slider, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Choose a Prominent Location

Place your logo slider somewhere where people are going to see it — your homepage, product/services pages, and About page are ideal.

2. Manual vs Auto-Scroll

Do you want visitors to manually advance through your logos using left/right arrows, dots underneath the slider, or swiping on mobile? Or do you want the logos to scroll automatically?

3. Ask for Permission

Ask for permission before using logos on your business site. Not only is it polite, but it’ll save you from getting a nasty letter from a lawyer later on.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

Choosing a WordPress Logo Slider Plugin

There are some key features you’ll want to look out for when choosing a WordPress logo slider plugin:

• Ease of use. Choose a solution that is intuitive and lets you quickly design your logo slider and insert it into your site.
• Size. Check that you can control the size of your logo slider. You want to make sure that it can easily fit into the layout of your site.
• Responsive design. Choose a solution that is responsive and allows you to control how your logo slider displays on tablet and mobile devices.
• Auto-scroll. Check that you can set the auto-scroll speed.
• Navigation. Look for a solution that lets you configure the navigation, whether you want to display left/right arrows that visitors click, or simple dots below the slider.
• Number of logos. How many logos can you include? Make sure the solution you use can handle the number of logos you want to display.
• Design. There are lots of WordPress logo slider plugins available that can help you create a basic slider but have limited functionality. For more features and control, Smart Slider 3 can help you create a WordPress logo in minutes.

Creating a WordPress Logo Slider with Smart Slider 3

In Smart Slider 3 Pro the Carousel slider type is the best choice to create a logo slider. In a WordPress carousel you can show more slides next to each other at the same time. And what is even cooler? You can create a logo slider easily and now I will show you how you can build the Logo Carousel template.

1. Plan

Planning is the most important part of the slider design process. You should plan for example where you would like to put your slider, or how big it should be. In a logo carousel you should calculate a bit. There are 3 main points: the slider size, the slide size and the maximum pane width. The slider size will be 1200px width and 350px height. This is the base size of your carousel, but the responsive mode will define how big your slider will be. In this template there is the auto responsive mode used, so the logo slider can be as big as the container it’s in.

Now you can decide how big the maximum pane should be, at this slider it is 1200px. It gives the maximum width of how far your slides can go within the carousel. The last thing you should plan how many slides you want within a slider at the same time. In this logo slider you can see 4 slides next to each other. 1200px/4 = 300px, but in this logo slider there is a little space between the slides, so the slide size will be a little smaller: 270x160px.

2. Create a new slider and choose the Carousel type

After you’ve planned the sizes, you can create your slider. First you should click on the New slider button, and you can choose the Carousel slide type. With this slider type you can create a logo slider the easiest way. Here you can add your Slider size, but you can change it later too.

3. Add a new slide

Now that you have a slider, you can create your first slide. In the logo carousel each slide has the same layout with a 1 Row 1 Col structure, where there is a simple image layer, the logo. The column gets 2px white border and 5px border radius, and a hover background color which makes a good impact.

4. Carousel slider type settings

After you’ve created the first slide, you can see the Slider settings, and at the General tab you will see the Carousel type settings too. Here you can add the Slider size, the Slide size and the Maximum pane width as I‘ve written above. Also you can upload a slider background image. This image will be below the slides, so when you navigate between the slides, this background gives you a static impression. Since the slides and the logos are white, this background gives a nice contrast too which the slides will be more visible. Finally you can set a slider autoplay interval to your slider, and the carousel will automatically move after the given time.

5. Use your first slide as a layout

You are almost ready with your logo slider. Now what you can do is that you duplicate your first slide, and use it as a template. The only thing what you should change is the image.

And that’s all, your logo slider is ready now. It wasn’t difficult, right?

Wrapping Up

Don’t hide who you’ve worked with. Inspire your customers with a WordPress logo slider. Because the more businesses that can vouch for your company and help potential customers feel confident working with you, the better!

Hopefully, this guide has helped you learn more about logo sliders. If you have any questions about how to create a logo sliders with Smart Slider 3, leave a comment below!

The post How to Create a Stunning WordPress Logo Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.