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.

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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.

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Why do people use WordPress carousels?

Carousels, regardless of what they’re called, save space. They also help make the visitors’ life easier. For example, by saving them the effort and time they’d have to spend scrolling. Additionally, carousels make it easy to compare similar elements, such as two products.

What’s more, carousels let you be creative. They help you create visually stunning designs to amaze your visitors. So, web developers, designers and clients like them. However, just like any element, carousels should be used with a purpose. There are many purposes for people to create carousels to display various kinds of content. Some of the most common types are:

• Image Carousel. Displays images with, or without caption.
• Post Carousel. Displays latest, most popular or selected list of articles.
• Product Carousel. Displays products, typically from WooCommerce to showcase them and to increase sales.
• Logo Carousel. Displays the logo of sponsors or companies the author has worked with.

9 Inspiring WordPress Carousel Examples

Do you want to create a cool WordPress Carousel to enrich your site, but don’t know where to start? I’ve got great news for you. I’ve collected 9 beautiful WordPress carousel examples you can create for your website. Let’s check them out!

1. Full Width Product Carousel

Live Preview

Generally, every slide in a product slider looks the same, only their content differs. In other words, they have the same colors, and their content is in the same order. If you want to stand out of the crowd you can mix different looking slides into your slider. For example, if you have more product categories, you can create a slider that shows 3 items from each. Then between them you can add a slide, that’s not about the product. For example, it can be a slide that prompts the visitor to check out the other products in the category. Or, use it to advertise a current or upcoming discount.

2. Product Carousel

Live Preview

The Product Carousel template looks modern as it uses pastel colors. It features a product image, and another one on mouse enter. Below the product image, visitors can see the name, category and price of the product. As it’s a full width slider, it’s perfect for using it as your shop’s hero.

3. Testimonial Carousel

Live Preview

Displaying customer testimonials is important for any business. Customers want to make sure they choose the best product, service and company to work with. So, they like to know how satisfied others are with your product or services. A carousel is a great way to display the testimonials, as it allows organizing them.

4. Post Slider Carousel

Live Preview

This carousel offers you a cool way to showcase your latest posts. You can use it to display the featured image, title, publication date, author and tags of your blog posts.

5. Boxed Product Carousel

Live Preview

Another cool carousel to display your products in a modern way. Product sliders typically display a picture of the product. This doesn’t only give a visual clue about the item, but also helps raise attention. When you create a product slider, make sure you also display the name, category and price of the product.

6. Logo Carousel

Live Preview

Most visitors can recognize the logos of large companies. This makes it easy for them to see the big name clients your company worked with. Seeing these logos gives reassurance: if a well-known brand works with you, you’re doing a good job. So, they’ll want to do business with you, too. So logo sliders and testimonials can be used for similar purposes.

7. Post Carousel

Live Preview

There are many ways to create a post carousel. You can use its featured image as a background and place its details on top. But you can also put the image above, below or next to the textual content. As a result, the visitors can view the images uninterruptedly. For example, on this carousel, the category, title, excerpt and read more button are on the left. The image itself is on the right side.

8. Squarespace carousel

Live Preview

What makes Squarespace’s carousel interesting is its animation. It’s like there’s a box moving around, that covers different parts of the images. The movement grabs the attention of any visitor and they’ll stop to check it out. It makes the whole carousel look unique and creative which visitors will appreciate.

9. Playersroom carousel

Live Preview

Playersroom is another example of a carousel that looks cool because of its effects. If you open the site and look at the carousel, it doesn’t seem special. But if you move your mouse over an image, it displays a text which describes what product you see. It’s a cool way of making the carousel interactive.

Conclusion

Don’t be afraid to use a carousel on your site! Carousels, and any other type of sliders are great design elements and will enrich your site. Additionally, they save space, look great and make your site more interesting to your visitors. Let these cool WordPress Carousel examples inspire you to create something awesome!

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What are the Benefits of News Sliders?

News sliders are a useful tool for publishers, not to mention a design tool you’ll often see across news and magazine websites. The benefits include:

• Dynamic content – The biggest benefit of news sliders is the ability to showcase dynamically generated content. This means your magazine slider will always feature fresh content from your WordPress site, and you won’t have to manually update it.
• Maximize space – Just like a real-life broadsheet newspaper, there isn’t much room above the fold when it comes to websites. With a news slider, you can showcase your top stories in the most space-saving, efficient way possible.
• Help readers focus – Magazine websites can get pretty cluttered when there are so many articles to read. A news slider lets you display 1-3 articles at a time so you can help reader focus on your most important stories.
• Appealing visuals – Images naturally complement news stories because readers want to see the action!
• Clear calls-to-action – With clear CTA buttons on your slides, you can direct readers to click-through to read your articles in full.

What Features Do News Sliders Have?

Surprisingly, the most popular news slider solutions involve coding jQuery plugins or cobbling together solutions with AJAX, HTML and CSS. While these solutions might be viable options for developers, there are several features that you’ll only find in modern slider tools like Smart Slider 3:

• Dynamic content – Whether you want to automatically display your latest news items or articles from an RSS feed, you can do it with a news slider.
• Post sliders – Showcase your latest posts from your blog, including custom post types.
• SEO-friendly – If you choose to use Smart Slider 3, any text you add to your slide layers will be search engine crawlable.
• Accessible – Modern slider tools like Smart Slider 3 meet the latest (WCAG) 2.0 requirements, ensuring your news slider is accessible for anyone.
• Responsive – It’s important to have a responsive slider that looks great on any screen, including mobile devices and fullscreen on desktops.
• Customizable – With Smart Slider 3, you can completely customize your news slider, including the size of your slide, the placement of images and text, and even the background, colors, and meta information.

7 Examples of News Sliders

Let’s take a look at some examples of multi-use news sliders to inspire you.

1. Post Slider Carousel

This beautiful news slider design lets you display three dynamically generated WordPress articles at a time. Readers can scroll left or right to see more. The text overlays provide title, date, author, description, and category information, with a slight blue underneath that helps the words “pop.”

2. Post Carousel

This simple post carousel features brief descriptions together with the title so you can get a nice summary of the article before clicking through to read the full post. This carousel design lets you sit two posts next to each other with eye-catching images. The dot navigation underneath lets readers know how many sliders there are to scroll through.

3. Full-width Post Slider

This stunning full-width slider design is ideal for sites that share travel-based news items. The full-width background lets you display images in full (JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, etc), while a break-out box lets you display a title, description and CTA to read more.

4. WordPress Carousel Post Slider

This simple, responsive design looks great on tablets — readers can easily swipe left and right to view other slides. The thumbnail images, categories, titles, and descriptions provide readers with information about the news items.

5. Magazine Slider

A magazine slider is a popular way to show your featured news. With that layout you can display more news with the group result setting on one slide at a time. You can easily put the featured image, the category, the post title, and the author of your 4 latest news. But if you would like to show other values, you can choose from a lot of variables.

6. Post Slider Showcase

Showcase your articles and grab your visitors’ attention to your magazine website! At a showcase slider you can show multiple slides together. The active slide is in the middle, but you can display the previous and the next slides as well. If you click on the non-active slides, the slider switches to that slide so the visitor can check its content. This is a nice and convenient way to encourage the visitor to check more news.

7. Carousel Divider

A post slider in a carousel is a great opportunity to cheer up your website. The shape divider gives a movement, and the colorful sections make your slider come alive. Feature the important news with this carousel and use it on your magazine homepage.

Wrapping Up

No matter what kind of news content you publish on your site, a news slider can help you display it in a highly visual and easy to access way. What’s more, you can showcase your latest articles items above the fold efficiently, ensuring that readers don’t miss any breaking news.

With Smart Slider 3, you can create responsive news sliders that pull in dynamic content from your WordPress or Joomla site, or even from an RSS feed. That means your post slider will automatically update every time you publish a new article on your site.

Do you have a news slider on your site? If you have any questions about using news sliders, let us know in the comments below!

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https://smartslider3.com/blog/hero-slider-ideas-examples-and-inspiration/ Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:00:14 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=9274 One of the biggest trends in web design and WordPress in recent years has been the use of big images. And not just large, but completely oversized images that come to life on screen. When used at the top of the page, they’re known as hero headers. But what I want to tell you more […]

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]]> One of the biggest trends in web design and WordPress in recent years has been the use of big images. And not just large, but completely oversized images that come to life on screen. When used at the top of the page, they’re known as hero headers. But what I want to tell you more about today is hero sliders.

What is a hero slider?

A hero slider extends the idea of a hero image, allowing you to present multiple hero images in sequence, using captions, transitions, and animation.

A hero slider is defined as a large, featured series of images prominently displayed on the homepage.

What’s so impressive about this hero slider on the Lonely Planet website is a number of things:

• It features four stunning photos, which you can scroll through at your leisure, or sit back and watch it on autoplay.
• There’s clear navigation at the bottom – each image has a description that puts it into context.
• There are clear calls-to-action labelled “Read More” that direct the reader to complete the desired action.
• When you click on the navigation, the autoplay stops so you can focus 100% on each image.

First impressions count, and this hero slider makes good use of Lonely Planet’s extensive archive of beautiful travel photography, making a strong first impression on would-be travelers.

What’s more, Angie Schottmuller describes a hero shot as “a credible photo or video of a solution that encompasses relevance, context, value, and emotion to support, educate, or persuade”.

So a hero slider isn’t simply series of large photos – they are large photos that complement your value proposition – in the case of Lonely Planet, beautiful travel locations – to provide clarity and context to your visitors. It’s a series of photos with a purpose.

Why Use a Hero Slider?

To really understand why hero sliders work, it’s important to understand some basic psychology behind how people judge your website. How visitors perceive your website plays a crucial role in how they interact with it. People feel happy when they see a website that:

• instantly makes sense,
• is easy to read,
• clear, and
• understandable.

It doesn’t take long for people to make a judgment about who you are and what you represent, and a hero slider helps create a sense of ease, clarity, and understandability right away.

In fact, it takes only about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for site visitors to form an opinion about your site. That’s how long you have to convince visitors to stay and not abandon your site.

Inspiring Examples of Hero Sliders

Some of the world’s biggest brands have recognized the value of hero sliders and their ability grab a visitor’s attention, allowing them to deliver key information in an organized and focused way.

SpaceX hero slider

SpaceX, like Lonely Planet, provides navigation below its images so visitors know exactly what’s coming up – three images that promote the company’s endeavors around space technology.

What’s great about hero sliders compared to single hero images is that you can feature a mix of image in limited screen real estate while still keeping visitors focused on your key messages.

Hero slider at Lamborghini

Lamborghini also uses a mix of video and high-resolution imagery to show off its cars, because why not? An image of a car is good, but a video of a luxury sports car speed along an open stretch of road? Even better. It creates a visually stunning cinematic experience.

When viewed on mobile, the slider defaults to a hero image, allowing Lamborghini visitors to views the car without the need to download high-resolution images on devices with limited bandwidth or data allowances.

Spotify’s hero slider

Spotify’s hero slider is simple yet effective. It maintains the same gradient background image, but allows visitors to scroll through a number of messages and corresponding CTA buttons. Why does this work? It’s easy, clear, and understandable – users don’t have to think too hard about what Spotify is offering, just click a button and download Spotify for free.

Stunning Examples of Smart Slider 3 Hero Sliders

With Smart Slider 3, you can easily recreate any of the slider designs above and make customizations to suit the look and feel of your WordPress site. Give Smart Slider 3 a try for free! and s Here are a few great examples that show off what you can achieve with this versatile plugin.

Virtual Conference

This gorgeous slider is a great example of modern hero sliders. It’s large, features a nice image and has spectacular effects. For example, it uses an Animated Heading Layer on the first slide, immediately catching the visitor’s attention. It has textual thumbnails for navigation. They’re great to explain what’s on the slide for the visitor before they decide to switch to it. Also, it has a cool Morph animation to switch slides

SEO Agency

Introducing your business is one of the most important aspects of having a website. The SEO Agency hero slider is a great way to do that. It’s a full width slider that uses pastel colors and nice illustrations. This vertical slider has a custom navigation (with emojis) on the first slide, and also next and previous arrows at the bottom. Apart from these the mouse wheel can be used to switch slides, which makes the experience super smooth.

Flower Shop Slider

This beautiful layered slider is a great example of how you can achieve a simple overlapping look, complete with animations, using several transparent layers and elements. The focal point is the main image of flowers on the right with transparent images of plants layered behind it; on top, there’s the name of the flowers arrangement and the price, all put together in a neat, eye-catching stack. The “shop now” CTA offers clear guidance to visitors who are ready to purchase, while the thumbnails on the right help the visitor scroll through the flowers and see what’s coming up next.

Rotating Hero Slider

This example, designed for web development and hosting companies, features a bright and clean WordPress design. But what catches the eye is the smooth wave effect at the bottom of the slider that adds a sense of movement. Again, there’s a clear CTA. Above it are icons that visitors can click through to see the other slides. Or, they can use the navigational arrows in the bottom-right. This slider also features a smooth fade transition that’s pleasing on the eye.

Common Problems with Hero Sliders (and Their Easy Solution)

Unfortunately, hero sliders do have haters. It’s true. And it’s a shame because, as I’ve outlined above, hero sliders have clear benefits for both site owners and users. Some of the common misconceptions include:

• “Sliders are confusing.” – WiderFunnel, 2011
• “People ignore sliders.” – Nielsen Norman Group, 2013
• “People consider sliders as advertising and don’t take in the messages they display.” – Neilsen Norman Group, 2013
• “Sliders are bad for SEO.” – Search Engine Land, 2013
• “Sliders don’t always work well on mobile devices.” – Brian Krogsgard, 2013

What you’ll notice about each of those links is that they were published in 2013 (with the exception of one review, which is even older). Well, it’s now 2018, which in tech years is a lifetime! Design techniques have advanced immensely over the past five years, nullifying many of the assertions made against hero sliders in these posts.

For a start, hero sliders back in 2013 (thanks to Wayback machine) looked a lot like this:

Ugly, right? No wonder people hated hero sliders. In 2018, hero sliders look like this:

Stunning! I often trot out this example because it’s so freaking beautiful. If it’s not already obvious, the difference between hero sliders from 2013 and those created in 2018 is design. It all comes down to good design. But also, modern slider solutions, such as Smart Slider 3, provide modern features, such as layers, transitions, text editing, custom CSS, and more – that make it easier than ever to design stunning sliders like the Squarespace one above with little effort.

Clearly, designing and choosing images and video for your hero sliders is as much art as it is science. It’s also just as much about branding as it is conversions. Fortunately, there are frameworks that can help guide decisions around hero slider design.

Angie Schottmuller’s 7-step framework provides a set of questions to ask yourself when judging hero images and video:

1. Keyword Relevance – Does the image visualize the targeted keyword or referring link text?
2. Purpose Clarity– Does the featured image help identify the page purpose and/or offer?
3. Design Support – Does the featured image support and enhance seamless flow of page design leading to the CTA? (i.e. photo size, complementary CTA color, contrast, complexity.) Does the featured image have a subtle cue pointing in the direction of the CTA? If yes, +1 bonus! (e.g. eye path, lines, shadows)
4. Authenticity – Does the featured image represent the organization and offer in an authentic, credible fashion? (i.e. genuine, honest, believable, actual vs. stock photo, brand-aligned)
5. Added Value – Does the featured image add value by showing detail or context to improve relevance, demonstrate benefits, and answer questions?
6. Desired Emotion – Does the featured image portray desired qualities or emotion to resonate and inspire action? (Considerations: mood, lighting, scene, body language, colors, urgency)
7. Customer “Hero” – Does the featured image depict the customer as the “hero” once equipped with this solution?

The hero slider above from 2013 lacks all of these points. But when you look at the Squarespace slider from 2018, it’s obvious a lot of thought has been put into its design, and it checks off each and every one of the 7 steps in Schottmuller’s framework.

Ultimately, great hero sliders have great design. They aren’t simply a sliding series of images. They are designed with purpose and with the user at the center of that purpose. Because when you ignore the user, and basic design considerations such as clarity, authenticity and emotion, you’ve really just got a boring set of images that don’t make any sense.

Again, with your hero slider, you’re looking to complement your value proposition and create a great first impression. And a well-designed slider will help you do exactly that.

What About SEO?

“Sliders are bad for SEO.”

Yes, this is true of some poorly-designed slider solutions. But modern options, like Smart Slider 3, make SEO a priority. This WordPress slider plugin allows you to add alt tags for each of the images in your sliders, as well as each layer in your slider. This ensures your images are not only accessible, but searchable in Google.

What About Mobile?

“Sliders don’t always work well on mobile devices.”

This might’ve been the case five years ago, but nowadays, slideshow plugins like Smart Slider 3 provide responsive solutions for different devices, including:

• The ability to swipe through slides rather than click
• You can turn layers on and off for different devices
• The ability to optimize fonts for smaller devices

With these features at your disposal, you can ensure your hero sliders look fantastic on all devices, including desktop and mobile.

Ready to Create Your Own Hero Slider?

Hero headers are among some of the best and most visually appealing trends in web design in recent years, but paired with sliders, they have even more visual punch. When done correctly, hero sliders deliver context and clarity, helping visitors quickly understand what your site is about and what you have to offer.

A great hero slider needs great design, and thanks to solutions like Smart Slider 3, anyone can create a beautiful slider with little effort, using features like drag-and-drop, animations, transitions, buttons, and more.

I hope this tutorial has inspired you to experiment with hero sliders. Feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

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