Now, without any further ado, let’s jump into the world of animations in Smart Slider 3.

📚 Table of contents

🎓 Getting Started with Smart Slider 3
⚙️ Understanding Slide Animations
⚡ Dynamic Text Effects: How to Animate Text
🔎 Bringing Depth with Zoom Effect
🌊 Making Waves: Using Wave Animation
💻 Storytelling with Timeline Animations
🎨 Customization
✏️ Best Practices for Animation Usage
💡 Conclusion

Getting Started with Smart Slider 3

Okay, let’s get things going by introducing you to the amazing world of Smart Slider 3. You can install the plugin now if you haven’t yet done it on your WordPress website. You’ll be stunned by its user-friendly interface and cool features, I promise.

Making your first slider is simple once Smart Slider 3 is up and running. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Making a New Slider:

• Go to your WordPress dashboard and select “Smart Slider 3” from the menu on the left.
• Select the “New Project” button, and voilá a new slider was born.

2. Selecting a Template (Optional):

• Smart Slider has got you covered even if you are not a design guru, so don’t worry. To spark your imagination, you might choose a pre-made template.
• There’s a huge selection of eye-catching templates to pick from, and they can all be customized to match the feel of your website.

3. Adding Slides and Content:

• Now comes the more enjoyable part. Slides should be added to your slider and it should be filled with interesting text, eye-catching images, and anything else you want to highlight.
• You are not restricted to a single layout with Smart Slider 3. Allow your creativity to soar!

4. Customize Your Slider:

• To customize the behavior and appearance of your slider, take a look at the slider settings. You can change the slider transition, the autoplay, the navigation, and much more.
• Pay attention to the responsive settings to make sure your slider looks good on desktop and mobile devices.

Now that you are familiar with the basics of setting up your slider, let’s get into the world of animations and effects that will make your slider stand out. Let’s get started!

Understanding Slide Animations

Alright, here’s where the real magic begins! Slide animations are like the secret ingredient that adds that wow factor to your sliders. These transitions between slides can be subtle and smooth or bold and eye-catching, depending on the vibe you want to create.

How to Apply Slide Animations

1. Select Your Slide:

• Open up your Smart Slider 3 editor and choose the slide you want to add animations to. Remember, each slide can have its own unique animation.

2. Explore Animation Options:

• Once you’ve selected the slide, head to the “Animations” tab in the slide settings. Here, you’ll find a treasure trove of animation effects waiting for you.

3. Pick Your Animation:

• From classic fade-ins to dynamic move-ins and captivating zoom effects, Smart Slider 3 offers an impressive range of animations to choose from.
• Go ahead and experiment with different animations to see which one complements your content and brand the best.

Top Tip: Less is often more when it comes to slide animations. Subtle and elegant transitions can have a more significant impact on your audience than an overload of flashy effects. Keep your focus on enhancing the content and user experience.

Example Animations

Not sure which animation to go with? Let’s explore a couple of scenarios where specific animations shine:

• Fade-In:  Ideal for a clean and professional look, the fade-in animation smoothly transitions between slides without stealing the show. It’s perfect for minimalistic designs and when you want to keep the focus on your content.
• Move from Left or Right: Want to make a bold statement? The move-in effect from either side can add that extra punch to your slider. Use it to introduce new sections or showcase striking visuals.
• Zoom Effect: Ah, the beloved zoom effect! If you have stunning images or products to flaunt, this animation can make them pop on the screen. Your audience won’t be able to take their eyes off your slider.

 

Remember, Smart Slider 3 gives you the flexibility to set the animation speed and even add delays if you want to create a well-choreographed presentation.

Now it’s time to let your creativity run wild and make your slides come alive with animations that leave your visitors wanting more.

Dynamic Text Effects: How to Animate Text

Okay, now we’ve got the hang of slide animations, but let’s take it to the next level! Your text elements are your slider’s storytellers. In addition, they add a whole new level of interactivity and engagement.

Ready? Let’s get started and see how we can animate text and engage your audience!

How to Animate Text

1. Add Your Text Element:

• To animate text, start by adding the text that you want to animate using either the Heading layer or the Animated Heading Layer. This could be a headline or any text you want to emphasize.

2. Add Text Animation:

• Once you’ve added your Heading Layer, navigate to the “Text Animation” sections of your layer’s Content settings. Here you’ll find a variety of text animation options to choose from.

3. Explore Styles:

• Check out Smart Slider 3’s selection they offer you to animate your text in different styles.
• On each heading, you can set both an Incoming and Outgoing animation. Whatever you are looking for you’ll be spoiled for choice.
• In addition, you can change other aspects of the animation to fine-tune it to your unique preferences.

4. Animated Heading Layer:

• On the other hand, you can also go for the Animated Heading Layer, which is perfect if you want to change a specific part of the text to another one from a list. However, this effect only works if you have at least two lines of text in the Animated Text field.

 

Pro Tip: Ensure that the way you animate your text matches your brand’s personality and your website’s theme. It’s important to stay consistent to create a polished and professional look.

When Should You Animate Text?

There are many ways to animate your text and add value to your content. Let’s look at some cases.

1. Catchy Headlines:

• • For your headline, you can use the Typewriter effect to reveal your headline letter by letter. This will create anticipation and intrigue in your visitors’ minds.
  • Play around with different text animations for your Headings, they can add a nice touch to your content, in a subtle way.

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2. Portfolio:

• • However, there are other ways it can be used to create interest, like sharing information about yourself. Adding a slow and elegant animation is the best way to make your portfolio impressive.

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3. Quotes:

• If you have great quotes and testimonials that you want people to read, you can choose from all the different incoming animations Smart Slider 3 offers, to focus on those impactful words.

Don’t overdo it: While text animations are a great way to grab the reader’s attention, don’t go overboard. Stick to what’s important and use animations to highlight those elements. Remember, a tiny bit of animation can make a difference in keeping your audience interested. Let your text speak for itself.

You are now in control of how your text looks and feels, so let’s create a slider that’s full of dynamic text effects.

Bringing Depth with Zoom Effect

The zoom effect is a great way to add depth and dynamics to your slide. It’s an effect that instantly draws attention to certain parts of the slide. Besides, it makes them look bigger and more alive.

How to Use the Zoom Effect

1. Select the Layer to Zoom:

• To use the zoom effect, select the layer you want to use a zoom effect on. You can use any slide element, such as an image, text, or even a heading.

2. Add a Zoom Effect:

• Once you’ve selected the element you want to add a zoom effect to, go to the layer settings and click on the “Animation” tab. You’ll see a list of options however, we’ll only need the scale animation.
• Under it choose the one that suits your slide. Decide if you want to bring your content closer to your audience or create a subtle downscaling effect. Then, adjust its settings to your preferences. There are many different ways to use this zoom effect in Smart Slider 3.

3. Use the Ken Burn Effect:

• Another way to add a unique zooming effect to your content, specifically to your background images, is to use the popular Ken Burns effect.
• Head to your slider’s Animations settings and under the Background Animation section enable the Ken Burn Effect. It’s extremely simple and elegant.

 

Pro Tip: Strategically use the zoom effect to highlight important content or product details. You can also use it as a soft hover effect to captivate users when they are interacting with your slider.

Creative Ways to Use the Zoom Effect

1. Product Showcase:

• If you are running an e-commerce site, highlight your product images with the zoom effect. Showing off your best offers will make your customers feel more confident in their purchase decision.

2. Interactive Image Gallery:

• Create an interactive image gallery with the zoom effect. When your visitors hover over your images, they will get a much closer look, creating an interactive and immersive experience for your visitors.

3. Elevate Your Background:

• • Move your background a bit, by adding the Ken Burn Effect. This zoom effect is simple and elegant and works on any kind of image.

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Zoom effects are a great way to add depth to your slides. However, it’s important that you remember that you don’t want to use too many zoom effects on your slider. Instead, focus on one or two essential elements to zoom in or out on and let them take the spotlight.

Making Waves: Using Wave Animation

Wave animations are the perfect way to add vibrancy to your sliders. So, let’s dive deep into the world of wave animations and learn how to bring your content to life.

How to Use the Wave Animation

1. Add Wave Animation to Your Background:

• You can add it to your background in Smart Slider 3, so think about what slider’s background can benefit from a bit of motion.
• Once you’ve chosen your slider, go to your Slider Settings page and choose the Animations tab. Inside the Background Animations section, you are provided with two different options to add a wave animation to your slider’s background. (Morph – Wave, Distortion – Wave) This type of animation will be only noticed when your visitors switch between slides.

Check out these templates to see them in action:

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2. Add a Wave Animation as a Divider:

• You can also add a wave animation as a Shape Divider. Just below the Background Animation section, you can spot the Shape Divider option. They are perfect for creating smooth and interesting transitions between the sections of your website.

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• What’s even more, is that each shape has its own unique animation, which you can fully customize. In addition, many of them are designed as animated wave-like shapes, and setting them to continuously move creates a simply marvelous result.

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3. Wave Animation Settings:

• Plus, Smart Slider 3 lets you customize the wave effect, giving you complete control over the intensity of the wave animation. Keep in mind that the goal is to add a thoughtful touch to your content, not overshadow it.

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All in all, adding a wave animation can be a great way to give your sliders a magical touch that will keep your visitors engaged and interested in your content, so let your creativity flow.

Storytelling with Timeline Animations

In Smart Slider 3 each layer animation is shown on a timeline, where you can change its delay and duration. If you click on an animation, it will open the layer window’s animation tab, where you can edit the animation you’ve chosen.

When you press the space key, animations will start up, giving you a preview of what they’ll look like.

Another awesome thing about timeline animations is that you can copy and paste the animation from layer to layer. So if you’ve made a really complex animation, all you have to do is copy it to different layers and you can save yourself time and effort.

Tips on Creating Timeline Animations

• Top Tip: Keep your timeline animation short and to the point. Focus on what matters the most to keep your audience engaged and avoid overloading them with too much information.
• Use timeline animations to create a seamless narrative that grabs your audience’s attention.
• Combine engaging content with smooth animations and you’ll have a mesmerizing storytelling experience that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Use the timeline animations to bring life to your slider and create an unforgettable story.

Customization

Now, that you’ve learned about the different animations and effects, your slider is more interesting than ever before. But don’t worry, we’re not finished yet. In this part, we’ll customize and personalize your designs until they are absolutely perfect. So, let’s get started.

Additional Animation Settings

1. Duration and Delay:

• Change the duration of your animations to control how fast or slow a layer animates, and you can also add delays to create a timed animation sequence.

2. Layer Alignment:

• Ensure the correct positioning of your animated layers with alignment settings. It’s the small details that matter!

3. Mix and Match:

• The fun part starts when you start mixing different animations and effects together. All of the above-mentioned animations and more are here at your disposal to create hypnotic effects that grab your audience’s attention and keep them glued to your content. So don’t be afraid to mix and match!

So now that you mastered the basics of animation, you’re ready to take your website sliders to the next level. Show off your creativity and let your website sliders steal the show.

Best Practices for Animation Usage

You’ve learned how to use Smart Slider 3’s animations and effects with ease. Now, let’s look at some important best practices to make the most of these dynamic tools while keeping your website fresh and professional.

Tips for Using Animations Tastefully

• Keep It Simple: Animations can be a great way to grab your audience’s attention but don’t overload your slider with a ton of effects. Too many effects can be distracting and overwhelming.
• Keep It Inline with Your Brand: Make sure your animations match your brand’s identity and design. Stick to a consistent style and color scheme to reinforce your message and create a unified experience for your audience.

User-Friendly Experience

• Navigation: Make sure your slider’s navigation is easy to understand and use. Give a clear overview of how the slider should be navigated.
• Attention Span: Attract your audience’s attention in the first few seconds. Avoid animations that are too long, as visitors may lose interest and move on.
• Testing: Make sure to test and preview the slider on different devices and browsers to ensure it works properly and looks the way you want it to.

By following these tips, you can make your sliders look amazing and not only let your audience see what you have to offer but also make their experience on your website better. Keep in mind that the key is to find the perfect balance between creativity and usability.

Conclusion

To sum up, your sliders will be full of life and imagination. From slide animation and zoom effect to how to animate text and create wave animation, we’ve even touched upon the captivating timeline animation and more. You’ve come a long way on this animation journey and Smart Slider 3 has been the perfect partner along the way.

Keep in mind that the best way to use animations is to keep them tasteful, relevant, and in line with your brand’s identity. Less is more when it comes to animations, a cohesive and visually appealing slider will leave your visitors with a lasting impression.

Thank you for joining us in this journey of animations and effects! Your commitment to improving the visual appeal of your website and engaging your audience is truly admirable.

The post How to Animate Text & Images Like a Pro appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/10-faqs-on-wordpress-sliders-everything-you-need-to-know/ Thu, 06 Jul 2023 09:17:20 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=52919 We’re thrilled to delve into the world of WordPress sliders! They can be a game-changer if you want to boost your website with dynamic content. Additionally, we’ll address the most frequently asked questions regarding WordPress sliders giving you the information you need to make wise choices. However, there’s still more! We have you covered whether […]

The post 10+ FAQs on WordPress Sliders: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> We’re thrilled to delve into the world of WordPress sliders! They can be a game-changer if you want to boost your website with dynamic content. Additionally, we’ll address the most frequently asked questions regarding WordPress sliders giving you the information you need to make wise choices.

However, there’s still more! We have you covered whether you are an inexperienced or a seasoned user. This article will support you with the necessary information to get the most out of WordPress sliders, from understanding the basics of sliders to improving their performance and customization. So let’s get started and look at the solutions to your most pressing questions concerning WordPress sliders.

📚 Table of contents

What is a WordPress Slider?
Should I Use Sliders On My Website?
Do Sliders Negatively Affect SEO?
Do Sliders Make Websites Slow?
What is the Easiest WordPress Slider?
What is the Best Free Slider for WordPress?
How Do I Create a Slider in WordPress?
What Size Should Slider Images Be in WordPress?
How Do I Make a Full-Width Slider in WordPress?
How Do I Make a Slider Autoplay in WordPress?
How Do I Make a Responsive Slider in WordPress?
How Do I Create a Post Slider?
How Do I Make a Slider in Elementor?
How Do I Create a Product Slider in WordPress?
Conclusion

What is a WordPress Slider?

Are you brand new to the WordPress slider community? We’ve got you, so don’t worry!

WordPress sliders, sometimes referred to as carousels or slideshows, are dynamic elements of a website that can present a variety of content, including media content in a slideshow format. It often takes up a primary spot on the homepage, drawing the users’ attention, while exhibiting its content in a visually appealing and engaging way.

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What is the Purpose of a Slider?

A WordPress slider’s main goal is to captivate visitors and offer them an alluring experience. Sliders are frequently used to:

1. • Showcase portfolio items

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1. • Make significant announcements

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1. • Highlight featured products

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1. • Display client testimonials

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They provide a dynamic and interactive feature that can improve the aesthetics and usability of your website. You can efficiently share information, pique your visitor’s interest, and advertise certain content or services by using a slider. Visitors can navigate among all types of content without overcrowding the page with material thanks to sliders. They help you display many bits of content in a limited space.

Should I Use Sliders On My Website?

You could be weighing whether you should add a WordPress slider to your website, now that we have a better understanding of what they are. Sliders can be intriguing, but it’s important to take into consideration the benefits and drawbacks before choosing one.

What are the Benefits of Using a Slider?

• Visual Appeal: Slider’s eye-catching content can quickly capture users’ attention and help establish a lasting first impression.
• Highlight Multiple Content: Sliders make it simple for visitors to browse through a variety of options by allowing you to display different pieces of content or products in a small space.
• Promotional Opportunities: Sliders are a great way to draw attention to special deals, brand-new items, or significant announcements.
• Enchanted User Experience: Including interactive sliders in your website, adds a visually appealing and dynamic outlook, additionally enhancing the overall user experience.

What are the Disadvantages of Using a Slider?

• User Distraction: Sliders that change slides automatically can divert users’ attention away from the primary message or call-to-action, which might have an impact on their focus and engagement. So in this case make sure to always allow the visitor to stop the autoplay on demand.
• Page Load: Sliders with huge image files can slow down page loads and degrade the user experience. We’ll explore this concept more later on and give you tips on how to avoid it.
• Accessibility Problems: Many users choose not to follow the useful recommendations given to make their sliders accessible. This causes it to have accessibility problems. So they either choose to drop the slider or just simply not make their website accessible.

Think of your website’s unique goals, target audience, and content before employing sliders. Sliders are a very useful tool if you have eye-catching visuals or a variety of products to highlight. However, firstly you should always consider the needs and goals of it for a moment.

Do Sliders Negatively Affect SEO?

It makes sense that you are wondering whether WordPress sliders are affecting SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Let’s answer some typical concerns and clarify the connection between sliders and SEO.

• Content Accessibility: A possible risk is search engines’ ability to correctly index and comprehend the content within sliders. It’s crucial to make sure the text content within a slider is crawlable. For improved accessibility, use a slider plugin that enables you to add alt text to your images, and lets you structure your content with different H tags. However, a good slider plugin also offers the opportunity to add text as paragraphs as well. In addition, your slider should have a good HTML structure.

 

• Page Load Times: A key element of SEO is how quickly your page loads. You must optimize your slider to prevent them from negatively affecting the speed of the entire website. Use effective image compression methods, reduce the picture sizes, and if your slider plugin supports it, activate lazy loading. Additionally, pick a performance-focused slider plugin, like Smart Slider 3, that’s lightweight and well-coded.
• Mobile Responsiveness: Search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites because they offer a better user experience. So make sure the slider plugin you use has choices for responsive design, and test your sliders on a variety of devices to make sure they appear correctly.
• User Engagement: Although not directly associated with sliders, user engagement metrics, like click-through rates, time on page, and bounce rates can nonetheless have an indirect influence on the SEO of your website. These can be positively impacted by engaging sliders that grab users’ attention and promote interaction. They can even inform search engines that your content is important and relevant.

Don’t let SEO concerns stop you from including sliders on your website. You can have a positive effect on your SEO efforts by implementing the best practices for accessibility, performance optimization, mobile friendliness, and unique content. Additionally, make sure to choose a slider plugin that has all the above-mentioned options for better accessibility.

Do Sliders Make Websites Slow?

The possible impact on website performance while utilizing WordPress sliders is a common concern. Let’s explore this and learn more about how to include sliders into your website with the best performance possible.

• Image Optimization: Images in sliders are commonly the main cause of longer page loads. To avoid this issue, optimize your slider images by resizing them and compressing them.

 

• Lazy Loading: Implementing lazy loading for your slider can greatly enhance the functionality of your website. It allows for faster initial page loads by only loading images within the slider when they enter the users’ viewport. Lazy loading features are included in several slider plugins, including Smart Slider 3.
• Reduce Animations and Effects: Although animations and transition effects can improve the aesthetic attractiveness of your sliders, too many or complex animations can have an adverse effect on the speed of your website. To ensure seamless and quick transitions on and between the slides choose animations that are lighter and simpler.
• Performance-Optimized Slider Plugin: Select a slider plugin that has been optimized for performance, because not all slider plugins are made equally in terms of speed. Choose a performance-optimized, lightweight, and well-coded plugin, like Smart Slider 3. Such plugins are created with the intention of prioritizing speed and reducing resource usage without sacrificing functionality.

Remember, optimizing numerous features, including sliders, contributes to the overall performance of your website. Utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to continuously evaluate the performance of your website and spot areas for development.

Don’t let your fear of website slowdown stop you from utilizing sliders to their full potential. You can profit from sliders without losing website speed by adopting optimization strategies like image optimization, lazy loading, and starting to use a performance-focused plugin, like Smart Slider 3.

What is the Easiest WordPress Slider?

Finding the easiest WordPress slider plugin will save you time and trouble, whether you’re new to WordPress or just searching for a user-friendly slider solution. Fortunately, there are some out there that put emphasis on simplicity without sacrificing functionality.

Smart Sldier 3 stands out as a superb option in terms of usability. It has a very user-friendly and straightforward interface, making it available to users of all skill levels. Without coding experience or other technical skills, you can easily design and edit sliders using its drag-and-drop builder.

With real-time previews, Smart Slider 3 offers a fluid editing process so you can see your changes right away. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to add and arrange slides, edit animations, include multimedia elements, and choose transition effects. To kickstart your slider-making process, you can also use the side library and the pre-designed templates.

Additionally, you can easily include sliders in your current website design, thanks to Smart Slider 3’s compatibility with well-known page builders like Elementor, Divi, Brizy, WPBAkery, and Avada Builder.

What is the Best Free Slider for WordPress?

You’ll be happy to know that there are several impressive solutions if you are looking for a free slider plugin for your WordPress website. However, Smart Sldier 3 stands out as a strong free slider plugin among them. It provides an astonishing amount of functions and customization options without charging you a thing.

Here’s why it’s on the top of the free slider plugins for WordPress:

1. Feature-rich: Smart Slider 3 offers a wide range of features equivalent to those found in premium slider plugins. You can get access to:
   • 5 different layers types and default and absolute position them
   • Image optimization
   • Page builder support
   • Dynamic content
   • Adjustable controls of your slider
   • 9 smooth background animations with customization options
2. Intuitive Interface: Smart Slider 3’s design makes it simple for both beginner and experienced users to build sliders with ease. You can easily organize slides and other layers using the drag-and-drop builder, and the real-time preview lets you watch the changes take effect as you edit your sliders.
3. Responsiveness: A slider must be responsive and mobile-friendly in order to function properly, given the growing popularity of mobile usage. Your sliders will be entirely responsive and mobile-friendly thanks to Smart Slider 3. It ensures the best viewing experience on a variety of screen sizes.
4. Template Library: Smart Slider 3 offers a variety of pre-designed templates to get you started with creating sliders. You can save time and work by using one of these templates, which provides a number of aesthetics for different sectors.
5. Compatibility: As it was already mentioned above, Smart Slider 3 works in perfect harmony with well-known page builders. Because of this, you can build your website using sliders without worrying about compatibility difficulties or conflicts.

Create engaging sliders without going overboard with your money to improve your website’s aesthetics and user engagement.

How Do I Create a Slider in WordPress?

With the help of the Smart Slider 3 plugin, WordPress makes it simple to create siders. Let’s go through the detailed instructions to get you started creating your own slider:

• Step 1: Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
  Go to “Plugins” in your WordPress dashboard and select “Add New”.
  Find “Smart Slider 3 “ by searching for it, then click “Install Now” next to the plugin.
  Once the plugin has been installed, click “Activate”.

 

• Step 2: Access Smart Slider 3
  Now, the WordPress sidebar has added the Smart Sldier 3 menu. To access the plugin’s dashboard click on it.

 

• Step 3: Create a New Slider
  Click the “New Project” button on the Smart Slider 3 dashboard.
  Choose whether you want to start from scratch or use a template.
  If you choose to build your own, then select the slider type you would like to use (block, simple slider, carousel, or showcase).

 

• Step 4: Customize your Slider
  You can add and arrange your slides. To add slides select the “Add Slide” button. Add content on each slide, change the settings, and add animations and effects as desired.
• Step 5: Configure Slider Settings
  On the Slider settings page, you can adjust and customize your slider wholly like, autoplay, animation, and controls. In addition, based on the layout of your website, modify the slider.
• Step 6: Publish the Slider
  Click the “Save” button when you are done with customizing the slider.
  There are different publishing possibilities available in Smart Slider 3. You can choose to embed the slider using a shortcode or a widget, or directly insert it into a page or post using the Gutenberg editor or page builder.
• Step 7: Check and Verify
  To make sure that your slider displays and operates as intended, preview it.
  To guarantee responsiveness and the best possible user experience, test your slider on a variety of screen sizes.

What Size Should Slider Images Be in WordPress?

Choosing the right size for your WordPress sliders’ images is essential, to ensure that they blend smoothly into the style of your website and offer the best viewing experience to your visitors.

Let’s look at some recommendations that can help you in choosing the right size for your sliders:

• Aspect Ratio: It is advised to match the slider’s aspect ratio to your website’s general layout and appearance. Choose an aspect ratio that works with the dimensions of your website’s content space.
• Proper Images: The size of the images should match the slider they are placed in. So don’t attempt to fit a 3000 px wide image within a 1200 px wide slider. The same goes for putting smaller images in bigger sliders.
• Full Width, Boxed, and Full Page: Choose whether you want your slider to be contained within a certain content area (boxed), cover the entire width of the browser window (full width), or fill in the browser’s width and height (full page). While the boxed layout can provide a more focused and under-control display, the other two can produce an experience that is more visually striking.
• Responsive Desing: Your slider must be capable of adjusting to various screen sizes. Therefore, select a slider plugin with responsive design choices, such as Smart Slider 3.
• Page Load Times: Even though they are aesthetically pleasing, sliders that require huge image files can considerably slow down page loads. Maintaining the balance between aesthetic appeal and performance is important. If you can, use jpg photos rather than png ones since they load more quickly. A nice slider image should not exceed 500 kb in size.
• Testing and Previewing: To make sure that your sliders are displayed as intended across various devices, it’s crucial to preview them. It’s important to ensure that your sliders adapt properly and maintain their aesthetic appeal.

How Do I Get an Image to Fit a Screen?

You can select how an image will fit the screen when you set it as a background image. You can choose one of five fill modes in Smart Slider 3, for each of your slides. Let’s check out how they work!

• Fill: This is the default option. If necessary, it crops the images so that it fits the whole slider.
• Fit: The entire image is seen, without cropping. The areas where the image can’t reach the slider are left unfilled.
• Blur fit: It doesn’t crop the image. However, it also doesn’t leave any blank areas in the slider. Actually, it fills them with the original image’s blurred form.
• Stretch: Here the image is stretched to fill the slider without being cropped. The visuals frequently become distorted as a result. Use with caution!
• Center: Contrary to popular perception, this setting won’t center the slider. It only places the background image there in its original size. As a result, this mode loses its responsive behavior.

Check out this video for an example of each mode in action:

How Do I Make a Full-Width Slider in WordPress?

A full-width slider in WordPress enables you to make a visually striking effect by leveraging the complete width of the browser window. Creating a full-width slider is simple with the help of Smart Slider 3. So let’s begin:

• Step 1: Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
  Follow the instructions mentioned previously in this post to install and activate the Smart Slider 3 plugin, if you haven’t yet.
• Step 2: Create a New Project
  From the WordPress dashboard select Smart Slider 3. Click on the “New Project” button, then choose the “Full width” layout.

 

• Step 3: Slider Settings
  In the Slider Editor select the Size tab. To make sure the slider fills the complete width of the browser window turn on the “Force Full Width” option. This option forces the slider to go outside of its container and makes it as wide as your screen. However, it has limitations, so it won’t work in every case.
• Step 4: Customize Your Slides
  Use the “Add Slide” button to add slides to your slider. Then add layers and animations to make it your own. Use the drag-and-drop editor to organize it in a manner you like.
• Step 5: Additional Settings
  Explore the wide range of settings Smart Slider 3 offers.
• Step 6: Preview and Test
  Always previous and test before moving on to the publishing process. Ensure your slider looks how you intended it to look. Test its responsiveness, and make adjustments to achieve the best results.
• Step 7: Publish Your Slider
  After you saved all the changes on your slider, you can publish it in your preferred way by choosing one of the publishing options Smart Slider 3 offers.

How Do I Make a Slider Autoplay in WordPress?

Even in the free version of Smart Slider 3, you can make autoplaying sliders, but the Pro version gives you additional features. Let’s go through each step:

• Step 1: Choose a Slider
  On the WordPress dashboard locate Smart Slider 3 and select it. To edit the slider, click on the one you would like to add autoplay to.
• Step 2: Enable Autoplay
  Go to the “Autoplay” tab inside the sider editor, then toggle the “Autoplay” option to enable it.

 

• Step 3: Adjust Autoplay Preferences
  Additional options will show up after you enable autoplay. In accordance with your preferences, you can adjust the configuration options.
• Step 4: Customize Autoplay (Optional)
  Advanced settings are available in Smart Sldier 3 to customize the autoplay further. Explore them, and additionally, you can change the options for controls, pause/play buttons, and indicators.
• Step 5: Preview and Test
  To check that the slider begins autoplaying in accordance with the selected parameters, preview your slider. In addition, test on various devices and screens.
• Step 6: Save and Publish
  When you are happy with the autoplay settings, click the “Save” button to keep your modifications. After this, you can publish it in your preferred way.

How Do I Make a Responsive Slider in WordPress?

A responsive slider makes sure that it adapts nicely to all screen sizes and devices, giving your visitors the best possible viewing experience. Luckily, making a responsive slider in WordPress is simple with Smart Slider 3, which is fully responsive. Besides, there are some features you can easily customize before proceeding.

• Font Sizes: To change the font size of your content just use the Text Scale option. The fact that this is a device-specific setting means that you don’t need to worry about changing the font size on other devices, which is one of the numerous advantages of using it.
• Hide Layers On Devices: Anybody can experience having their desktop layers look bad on mobile view. With Smart Slider, you can hide whatever layer you want on any device, so there’s no need to worry. Use the “Hide On” feature in the layer window to get to this option. It can be quite beneficial to be able to hide your layers individually.
• Hide Slides On Devices: If you are using the Pro version, hiding your slides on different devices can be another great option to improve the responsiveness of your sliders.
• Hide Sliders On Devices: Or just simply disable the slider, which will hide everything on the selected device.
• Controls: Your controls can also be hidden since some of them are simpler to use on desktops but on smaller devices, they seem to be more challenging.

How Do I Create a Post Slider?

Making thumbnail sliders for simple navigation is one of Smart Slider 3’s outstanding capabilities. If you want to highlight a number of pages or posts, you can even go one step further and build a WordPress carousel with the help of it.

Although there are many great slider plugins available, let me explain why Smart Slider 3 is unique. You have complete control over the design and can easily make a free full-width slider that looks good on all screens. Additionally, it has more functionality than many other groundbreaking slider plugins.

However, there’s still more! The Dynamic Slider feature is a great tool in Smart Slider 3. You can use this tool to build slides from your WordPress posts that update anytime you make changes to the original post itself. So the maintenance will be simple.

You can make as many dynamic slides as you wish. On top of that, you can create a custom post type slider using Smart Slider 3. This offers full access to the featured image, textual content, URL, post title, categories, and tags of your posts. What’s more, you can add custom layers to design and represent these slides as you wish.

Therefore, Smart Slider 3 is the way to go without any doubt, if you are looking for a user-friendly plugin with advanced customization options, that goes above and beyond the essentials. Give it a try and see how beautiful sliders and carousels can make your website come to life.

How Do You Make a Dynamic Slider?

Now we can move on to the actual process of creating a dynamically changing slider. So follow along for this 5-step guide to create your own:

1. Create a Dynamic Slide

You can add a dynamic slide either to an already-created slider or a new one. When you add new content to your source, the slide will automatically update. You should configure the generator and decide how many dynamic slides you want to have in the slider.

2. Set Up the Generator

There are several sources to pick from. If you have the Pro version of Smart Slider 3, then you can select from 20 sources in WordPress and 27 sources in Joomla to build a post slider from your Joomla articles and WordPress posts.

3. Create Your Own Slider

You can design your own slider if you want to make one that’s distinctive. Additionally, you can import predefined-slider examples in Smart Slider 3 to use as dynamic slides. Simply copy the layout and paste it into your dynamic slide to complete the task.
You can learn more about how to utilize the demo slider in your generator by reading our documentation.

4. Insert Variable

Set variables if you want your content to change dynamically. Where variables are not used, a static layer will be present.

5. Publish the Slider

Your slider can now be published, such as a shortcode, or turned into a Gutenberg block. Your slider will also show up on the frontend and automatically refresh.

How Do I Make a Slider in Elementor?

As you may know in Elemnetor you can create simple sliders. However, there are only 3 layers you can add to it: a heading, text, and a button layer. In addition, they have fixed places, so there’s not much room for creativity. This might be the right choice for some websites. But, if you would like to create a more advanced slider where you would like to add additional content, you need to look for a slider plugin that works well with Elementor.

Let’s look at how you can make it happen with Smart Slider 3:

1. Install and Activate Smart Slider 3
2. Create a new slider and add slides
3. Customize each slide to match your own preferences
4. Create a new page or edit an existing one with Elementor
5. Drag and drop the Smart Slider 3 widget wherever you would like it to be
6. Select your slider
7. Save and Publish

You don’t need to start from scratch, browse the template library to find the most suitable slider for your project.

 

As you can see using Smart Slider 3 with Elementor couldn’t be easier. Just create your preferred slider, add the Smart Slider 3 widget to Elementor, and select the one you’ve created. It’s effortless, time-saving, and fun.

How Do I Create a Product Slider in WordPress?

Smart Slider 3 is a great tool for building special and functional product sliders for your online store in WordPress. In addition, you don’t have to worry about losing mobile visitors, since Smart Slider will take care of it for you.

With this plugin, you are offered a wide range of options for how to effectively display your products. To show your items from various perspectives or highlight their unique features you can add additional image layers. It also helps you with adding specific information about each product using the heading and text layers. Besides, you can design call-to-action buttons that send your visitors to the category or product pages for additional information.

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The fact that you can select from the pre-made templates or create your own slider without any coding experience is pretty fantastic. There are no restrictions on how many sliders you can make.

You can draw attention to your top-selling items, or special deals. Moreover, it’s very simple to add a call-to-action button that will persuade visitors to take action. Both the Carousel and Showcase slider types offer beautiful layouts and perfect responsiveness, depending on what your preferences are. In contrast to the Showcase type, the Carousel type maintains the same number of visible slides regardless of the screen size.

In short, if you would like to create captivating product sliders that easily catch the attention of your audience and help you achieve your goals, then give Smart Slider 3 a go.

Engaging Product Slider Examples

Now, let’s look at some stunning examples of different product sliders, to help you get started with your next project.

Product Carousel

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To present your products in an engaging and responsive manner, you can utilize the WooCommerce carousel slider. The amazing thing about it is that it shows numerous products slides together, rather than just one slide at a time, which creates an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. The slider and the slide widths are completely adjustable, and you can even decide how many products you would like to show at once. With this fantastic tool, making a responsive carousel is quite simple.

Full-Width Product Carousel

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A really cool slider that’s ideal for presenting your products is the Full-Width Product Carousel. What’s so eye-catching about this is that it introduces some pretty creative concepts, like creating a background with a complementary color to further highlight your items. Additionally, it has space for special slides, including those that advertise offers or encourages your visitors to sign up to your newsletter. They can view several slides at once with this carousel type, allowing them to see more of what you have to offer. It’s an excellent strategy for getting their attention.

Full Page Product Slider

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You don’t see the Full-page product slider every day, do you? It’s a wonderful idea to create a full-page product slider to make yourself stand out from the competition. With its cool animations and smooth navigation. The Top 5 Product template takes it to the next level. And the best thing, though? You have plenty of room to include product descriptions and give your buyers all the information they need. This strategy is fantastic for getting their attention and leaving a positive impact.

Showcase Product Slider

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The Showcase slider type stands out because it shows several slides at once, giving your visitors more to look at. Bet here’s the cool part: by making the main slide larger than the others, it always focuses all the attention on it. The centered slide gets all the attention thanks to this innovative design, while also showcasing the remaining slides. It’s a great technique to draw attention to your content and keep people interested. Try it out to see for yourself!

Conclusion

Congrats! Now you have a firm understanding of WordPress sliders and how they can advance your website. Throughout this post, we’ve answered the most frequently asked questions regarding sliders, including their advantages and effect on SEO as well as their functionality and customizability possibilities.

By utilizing sliders, you can attract users to your WordPress site, highlight key content, and significantly impact your visitors. Sliders offer an effective approach to engaging your audience and successfully delivering your message, regardless of whether you are a blogger, designer, developer, or business owner.

And Smart Slider 3 is the real deal when it comes to selecting the best slider plugin. It’s the most outstanding option for building gorgeous sliders that blend with your website flawlessly. All thanks to its user-friendly interface, rich customization options, and compatibility with well-known page builders.

Why wait then? Utilize Smart Slider 3, and discover the full potential sliders can bring to your website when you make the right choices. Get ready to engage your visitors with aesthetically pleasing sliders.

We hope this post has given you insightful information and useful advice for your adventure with sliders. Feel free to get in touch with us through our support system if you have any additional questions or need assistance. We are here to help you make your sliders shine!

Thank you for joining us on this slider adventure. Stay tuned for more exciting content and helpful tips on WordPress and web design. Happy sliding!

The post 10+ FAQs on WordPress Sliders: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/step-by-step-guide-create-an-image-carousel-in-wordpress/ Fri, 19 May 2023 08:50:42 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=52395 One of the easiest ways to engage your audience is providing them with dynamic and visually appealing content. Image carousels have become popular as a result of their captivating nature. It allows WordPress websites to showcase their content and message effectively. Are you curious about how to add image carousels to your website? Then keep […]

The post Step-by-Step Guide: Create an Image Carousel in WordPress appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> One of the easiest ways to engage your audience is providing them with dynamic and visually appealing content. Image carousels have become popular as a result of their captivating nature. It allows WordPress websites to showcase their content and message effectively. Are you curious about how to add image carousels to your website? Then keep reading.

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting your journey in the WordPress design world or if you have years of experience behind you. This post will aid you with useful tools and the knowledge you’ll need to create your own unique image carousels that without any doubt will boost your website’s popularity. Here’s a step-by-step guide for building an image carousel in WordPress.

However, before we go any further with the technical stuff, we need to understand the importance of image carousels in WordPress. Now, the reason why we have to get a better understanding of its advantages and objectives is because this way there will be no doubt about why they are today a crucial part of many websites.

To answer all the questions you may have regarding this topic, we’ll dive into the most common FAQs like:

• How to make image carousels in WordPress?
• How to customize the appearance, control, speed, and transitions?
• How to add descriptions and captions?
• Which plugin is best suited for creating image carousels?

and so much more.

That’s not even all of it, we’ll also explore how Smart Slider 3 can assist you in building sliders that are guaranteed to leave your audience filled with surprise and wonder.
So let’s dive in and learn how to make the most out of image carousels in WordPress.

📚 Table of contents

🎓 Understanding Image Carousels in WordPress
⚡ Getting Started with Smart Slider
✏️ Creating Image Carousels with Smart Slider
💻 Advanced Features and Customization
💡 Conclusion

Understanding Image Carousels in WordPress

Slider carousels or image carousels, which are also occasionally referred to as slideshows due to their behavior, represent content in a fascinating way. They introduce their details or images in a rotating style.

Their way of offering visually engaging content in an interactive method gained them increasing popularity among web designers and developers.
In addition, their ability to represent captivating content in a limited space also didn’t lessen the appeal.

Why Use Image Carousels?

Purpose:

• Presenting customer testimonials or reviews:

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• Highlighting products and services:

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• Showcasing image galleries:

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• Displaying logos:

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• Introducing your team:

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• Presenting your latest posts:

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• Flaunting your social media posts:

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Benefits:

• Increase Engagement: They motivate interaction with your slider, which results in longer visit times.
• Effective Space Utilization: Carousels solve your space issues by letting you display numerous bits of material in a small space even when your screen space is limited.

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• Visual Appeal: Dynamic and eye-catching carousels improve your website’s looks and make a lasting impact.
• Better Storytelling: Carousels have a narrative flow that makes it possible to convey stories or lead visitors on particular journeys.
• Very Adaptable: You can implement them into a variety of websites, including blogs, e-commerce, portfolios, and business websites.

What is the Best Plugin for Creating Image Carousels in WordPress?

If you search for plugins that allow you to create image carousels for WordPress, you will find various options at your fingertips. However, Smart Slider is an outstanding alternative.

There are various plugins available for WordPress that allow you to create image carousels. Nevertheless, Smart Slider 3 is a highly suggested alternative. To speed up the production of carousels, this robust and feature-rich plugin provides a user-friendly interface, several customization possibilities, and a selection of pre-designed templates. Smart Slider makes it easy to make professional and highly engaging image carousels for your site. It helps you with improving your website’s visual appeal.

Now, we fully understand image carousels and the benefits that come with them. Let’s move on to the actual actions we have to take to create them in WordPress with Smart Slider.

Getting Started with Smart Slider

The first step in the building process of image carousels is to install and set up the Smart Slider plugin on your WordPress site.

With Smart Slider creating carousels is simply the best. It provides a number of customization options to achieve your desired look without sacrificing the user experience or technical necessities for SEO. Let’s take off on this journey together.

Installing and Setting Up Smart Slider 3

This can be achieved in a few simple steps:

• Navigate to the left column of your WordPress dashboard to the “Plugins” section and click on the “Add new” option.
• Write “Smart Slider 3” into your search bar, then click on the “Install Now” button.

 

• As soon as it’s ready, you can activate the plugin for your website.

Once you are done with the activation process, Smart Slider will offer you all the visual and textual guides you will need through documents and tutorial videos.

Smart Slider 3’s Dashboard

When you are ready, you can move on to the next step of navigating to the Smart Slider Dashboard where the actual magic happens. Here you can start creating your image carousels, but first:

• You need to get comfortable with the various possibilities the Dashboard offers.

 

• Then you can move on to check out the wide range of pre-designed and stunning templates the template library provides. Make sure to check out all of the unique slider types as well.

Create your First Image Carousel

You can either choose to start from scratch or you could try out a template that matches your idea:

• Press the “New Project” button, so you can start creating your slider with the carousel slider type.
• It’s up to you if you would like to start with a completely blank slider or add a template from the library.

Managing your Slides

Now as your slider is created, let’s dive into how you can make it your own unique image carousel slider:

• Firstly, to add new slides to your design, simply click on the “Add Slide” option, this way you can make it into an actual carousel.

• Boost your slider’s content by uploading your images. You can add it to your slide’s background or just as a design element.
• Not to mention, you can tailor your content to your own preferences, by including headings, buttons, transition effects, or any type of design. Smart Slider offers a wide range of features that you can play around with until you find the most suitable ones.

Now that we’ve answered the “How do I add an image carousel in WordPress?” question, we can gather that if you follow these easy steps, adding an image carousel to your WordPress website doesn’t have to take a genius. Smart Slider’s clean interface and extensive settings help you out and take the burden off your chest.

Let’s move on to the next section, which will help us discover the possibilities of customization in Smart Slider 3.

Creating Image Carousels with Smart Slider

Smart Slider stands out from other sliders with its broad options for design. Therefore, if you are looking for a plugin that allows you to conveniently edit the effects and look of your image carousel and tone it to your page’s individual design, then you should try out Smart Slider.

Let’s find out how to make the most of Smart Slider’s various features for image carousel customization.

Styling and Design

You can find a wide range of tools to edit your carousel:

• Important layout elements: You can adjust the slider and slide size, maximum pane width, and the minimum slide distance of your carousel for your own preferences.

 

• Slide Editor: Here you can configure all of your design elements in your slide to match your brand. This includes backgrounds, colors, fonts, and many more unique settings.

Animations

There are some unique ways to elevate your project with fascinating effects in Smart Slider. Let’s look at some of them that can improve the visual impact of your image carousel:

• Animation Types: To create dynamic and seamless slide changes, choose from a variety of transitions and animations, you can set your slide to a single switch and more.
• Duration: Tailor transition time to manage the rate at which slides change delivering the best possible user experience.

Removing or Adding Captions

Smart Slider 3 lets you add captions or descriptions to give your photographs more context or information:

• Text and Heading Layer: Easily add text layers to your slides to add informative text or draw attention to particular elements. Don’t forget that the clearer the images and shorter the text, the more likely users are to engage with your content.
• Formatting Options: Change your captions’ font family, size, color, alignment, and animation effects. Moreover, pay special attention to the buttons and links, they should be large enough so that they can be easily clicked, even on mobile devices.

Responsive Design

It is essential to make sure your image carousel appears fantastic on all devices in today’s mobile-driven environment. Making responsive carousels is easier with Smart Slider 3:

• Basic responsive behavior: The responsive behavior of the carousel slider is one that it displays as many slides as it can fit within the current size, without resizing the slides until the last one can no longer fit.

• Responsive controls: The slider is touch-friendly for mobile users, and it includes both arrows and bullets for navigation and quick access to the slides, which you can hide if you want to save space.
• Full-width product carousel: This image carousel has equal spacing between each slide as a result of the side spacing option.
• Single Switch: To eliminate empty space you can enable this setting while also setting the Main Animation to Horizontal.

 

• Utilize the mobile-friendly features: Optimize the font sizes with the Font-Resizer, adjust the layout, and everything that may come up in order to offer an effortlessly convenient sliding for your audience.

FAQs

 

You have the ability to make your WordPress site’s image carousel into a visually appealing and compelling slider by using Smart Slider 3. We’ll look at even more advanced options that can elevate your carousel in the following section.

Advanced Features and Customization

It can be gathered that Smart Slider offers a wide range of options to take your image carousel to the next level in WordPress.

Now, let’s look at some of the more advanced features that we hardly mentioned above, so they need more explanation to do. These are the ultimate solutions for effective performance and interactivity with your carousel.

How do I Add Navigation Arrows or Dots to the Image Carousel in WordPress?

With Smart Slider you can, without any difficulty, insert arrows and bullets into your slider. This makes it easy to enhance the user experience, giving them control over your image carousel.

In the Controls tab add arrows or bullets or even both to your image carousel to improve the user experience:

• Arrows: Give users the option of manually navigating the slides using the designable arrow icons.

 

• Include Bullets: At the bottom of the carousel, you can show a series of dots that represent the current slide and allow for easy navigation. Design them to match your preferences.

Dynamic Content

You have control over what particular post or page your image carousel displays thanks to Smart Slider 3:

• To ensure that just the chosen pages or posts are displayed and that they appear exactly how you want them to, use the variable option in Smart Slider. They allow you to pull data from a dynamic source to your slide.
• With them, you can pull the post titles, descriptions, or URLs to your slides.
• To use them, add a layer to your slide and find the Data button above the input field.

 

• Then, clicking on the button will open the Insert variable popup, where you can find the list of available variables and the result they’ll display.

Are There Any SEO Considerations for Image Carousels in WordPress?

Without any doubt! Smart Slider takes into consideration every aspect of your image carousel to optimize for SEO.

Additionally, here are some awesome tips to improve it and make it even more noticeable:

• Add alt text to your images: They make it easier for search engines to index your images, especially when the slider mostly represents images with a small amount or no text at all.

 

• Set proper H tags: Well-structured content is crucial for SEO, adding the correct headings can make or break your visibility.

 

• Write text without H tags: Not everything needs to be a heading.

With these cutting-edge options, Smart Slider 3 gives you the freedom to design image carousels that are customized to your unique preferences. Hop on to the final section for a summary of the main ideas we discussed.

Conclusion

All things considered, image carousels can be used as the perfect tool for mesmerizing and enlightening your audience. As we all know, visual engagement can be essential in today’s digital environment.

We learned that you can design gorgeous image carousels in WordPress that not only draw attention but also improve user experience. All this is thanks to the flexibility and powerful features of Smart Slider 3.

In addition, we looked at how to use Smart Slider 3 for this purpose following a step-by-step process. From setup and installation to customization we covered everything.
By reading through these recommendations, you now have all the information and resources you will need.

Therefore, now you can design interactive carousels that are both visually appealing and match the goals of your website.

Smart Slider is here to take the burden off your chest and help you implement and take advantage of these benefits. So in case you still haven’t checked out these features, you should make sure to don’t miss out. These characteristics include an easy-to-use interface with various settings for customization so you can create your own ideal image carousel in WordPress.

Regret is often born from missed opportunities. So why wait and regret? Get started and elevate your website with stunning image carousels that catch the eye and leave your visitors in a daze. Keep in mind, that every step you take has an impact on your online presence.

Are you ready? Install Smart Slider 3, if you haven’t yet, and unlock a world of possibilities for your image carousel in the WordPress world. It’s time to engage and captivate all of the users.

The post Step-by-Step Guide: Create an Image Carousel in WordPress 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.

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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.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/instagram-slider-wordpress/ Thu, 03 Mar 2022 07:20:43 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=44835 Instagram is one of today’s most popular social media platforms. It went down a very similar path to WordPress. WordPress started as a blogging platform, but it soon became the most popular CMS. In fact, at the moment of writing WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. Instagram started as a personal photo journal […]

The post How to Add an Instagram Slider for your WordPress Site? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Instagram is one of today’s most popular social media platforms. It went down a very similar path to WordPress. WordPress started as a blogging platform, but it soon became the most popular CMS. In fact, at the moment of writing WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. Instagram started as a personal photo journal but it has become more and more popular. Actually, it has turned into a platform that helps anyone grow visibility at a rapid rate. Thus, it makes sense that you want to create an Instagram slider to display your Instagram posts on your site.

Why do you need an Instagram slider?

Instagram is the best social platform to grow brand awareness. So, the more you post on Instagram the more chances you have to reach new people. Since you post many awesome things to Instagram, you might want to bring these posts to your website as well. As you can post images and videos to Instagram, it makes a lot of sense to display its post in the form of a slider. In fact, a slider is the best tool to display many photos or videos in a captivating manner on a website.

Social media presence can help you build trust in your visitors. Being active in social media tells people you’re a real person and they should do business with you. In other words, when a visitor sees your Instagram posts on your website, they’ll look at your profile. They’ll see your posts and know you take your business seriously. So, a slider from your Instagram images and videos can get you more sales!

How to create an Instagram slider in WordPress?

The simplest way of creating an Instagram slider in WordPress is to install a plugin to help you. But there are many plugins available to help you create a nice slider from your Instagram posts. Unfortunately, lots of these plugins limit you in some way. For example, they let you create sliders with a limited number of layouts. If you don’t want any limitations, give Smart Slider Pro a try!

So, how do you get an Instagram slider up and running on your site? Follow these simple steps:

1. Install Smart Slider Pro
2. Create a new slider project
3. Click on Add new, choose Dynamic Slide and find Instagram
4. Set up your Instagram app and request a new token
5. Choose the content your slider should display
6. Create your beautiful slides based on your Instagram content

Need more detailed instructions? Check the dedicated documentation on how to set up the Instagram generator.

Why should you use Smart Slider to create an Instagram slider?

Smart Slider is the most popular responsive slider for WordPress. The Instagram slider generator has finally arrived at Smart Slider! From now on you can create beautiful sliders from your Instagram posts. In fact, Smart Slider does not limit you to predefined layouts to create your slider. So, you can create simple image or video slides. But you can also add the date, time and caption of the post in the layout you want. Actually, all sliders you create from your Instagram posts can look completely different. How cool is that?

To learn more about creating an Instagram slider in Smart Slider, be sure you watch our detailed tutorial video below.

Inspiring Instagram Slider templates

Every time we release a new feature to Smart Slider, we add inspiring new templates. These templates help us to showcase the new feature. Additionally, they’re very helpful to inspire you to create something awesome. To show the power of the Instagram generator, we created not one, but two new slider templates.

Instagram Slider

The Instagram Slider template helps your visitors focus on one single post at a time. So, they can view the image you posted to Instagram in a large size. Next to the image you can find the post’s description, partly covering the image.

Instagram Carousel

The Instagram Carousel displays your posts in a more traditional manner. Instead of displaying one slide at a time, the visitors can see more slides next to each other. A carousel like this allows the visitors to quickly browse the slides to check your images.

How to use a template slider in your generator?

Smart Slider comes with a great number of gorgeous slider templates. These templates don’t use any dynamic slides, so all users can import and use them on their site. This might raise the question: how to make the template slider use dynamic slides? It’s pretty simple, you just need to follow the steps below:

1. Import the template you want to use
2. Go to one of the slides and copy it
3. Create a slide using the Instagram generator
4. Paste the slide you copied before
5. Replace the copied content with the Instagram generator’s variables
6. Remove the slides from the template

Be sure to check out the documentation article for detailed instructions.

Conclusion

The Instagram generator is an awesome addition to Smart Slider. Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms. As a result, it’s one of the best tools to raise brand awareness. Now that you can bring your photos and videos from Instagram to your website, you can use the power of Instagram to build trust. And building trust is one of the most important factors of creating a successful website.

The post How to Add an Instagram Slider for your WordPress Site? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/smart-slider-features-you-didnt-know-about/ Wed, 08 Sep 2021 12:39:36 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=42036 When you choose a slider for your projects, you need to consider its features. After all, you need the plugin to create gorgeous sliders which match your criteria. Plugin developers add many features to their product to ensure it meets the needs of most users. As a result, the plugins end up having many options […]

The post 10+1 Smart Slider Features You Probably Didn’t Know About appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> When you choose a slider for your projects, you need to consider its features. After all, you need the plugin to create gorgeous sliders which match your criteria. Plugin developers add many features to their product to ensure it meets the needs of most users. As a result, the plugins end up having many options which makes it challenging to become expert users. In this article I’ve collected 10+1 cool Smart Slider features which are super useful for you.

Beware: some of these options are available in Smart Slider Pro.

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Popular features in Smart Slider

Smart Slider is one of the best WordPress slider plugins. As a result, it offers the most popular features people are looking for. The effects like Parallax, Particle and Ken Burns are all available. Additionally, you can add cool looking Shape Divider to your sliders. Furthermore, you can select beautiful background animations to make image galleries look stunning. You can display your images or videos in a lightbox. Also, you can introduce your layers to the slide using nice layer animations.

Additionally, any slider you create using Smart Slider is responsive. In other words, they look fantastic on any device and screen size. Of course, there are many options you can use to fine-tune the result for tablet and mobile devices.

10+1 Smart Slider features you probably didn’t know about

Smart Slider offers many awesome options apart from the most popular features. Some of these are not as obvious, but if you know them, they help you work faster and more efficiently. So, it’s worth knowing these options and using them in your projects. With the help of these options, you can easily become a Smart Slider expert.

1. Custom Post generator

Smart Slider has a huge list of dynamic slide generators. What can you do with a dynamic slide generator? You can use it to create slides automatically based on your WordPress post or WooCommerce products. There are also generators which work based on the content of other WordPress plugins. For example, if you use The Events Calendar plugin, you can create slides based on its events.

The Custom post generator lets you create slides from posts in your custom post types (CPT for short). What are custom post types? They’re content types like the posts or pages. There are many cases where you can use a CPT, for example, to store and display customer stories or testimonials. If you sell homes you can create a CPT where you upload each house as an individual post.

The custom post generator is also useful if you create a site for your clients. For example, you can let your client add, edit or delete slides without having to access Smart Slider.

2. Layer defaults

Do you work based on a style guide when you create sites for your clients? Having to set the same font family, color and size when you add a new layer must be tiring. Using the Layer defaults you can change the default look of the layers when you add a new one. For example, when you add a heading layer it has “Roboto,Arial” font family, white color and 36px size. If your site uses a different font family, you can change the default value, so you won’t have to change it at every layer.

3. Presets

Another cool feature to speed up your workflow is the preset. Most websites generally have different font sizes for the different heading levels. E.g. a h2 heading might have 36px size, but a h3 heading might have only 30px size. You can save each style as a new preset and apply it to your layers with one click.

4. Custom font list

When you create a layer with text, you’ll likely want to use a font family that’s different from our default font. You can either select the new font family from the predefined font list or manually type it in. Having the predefined font list is cool, but it contains lots of fonts you’ll probably never use. So why not change it to contain your most used or favorite fonts?

5. Slide Library

Smart Slider offers more than 100 ready to use slider templates for Pro users. If you don’t need a whole slider, just a single slide, you can browse the Slide Library for ideas. The Slide Library contains two themes, and each offers 90+ slides in 8 categories. The most popular categories are Header, Product and Content. So, if you create a header slider, you can check the slides in the Header category to get a headstart.

6. Static Overlay

A Static Overlay is a special kind of slide, which displays above all other slides in the slider and won’t move away. For this reason it’s recommended that you only have one Static Overlay per slider.

Static Overlays are a great way to create “global” layers, which will appear on top of other slide’s content. For example, you can create a cool slider where you put the actual content to the Static Overlay. Then you can add image slides that move under it.

7. Slider Background

Slider backgrounds are quite the opposite of the Static Overlay. While a Static Overlay is above all slides in the slider, the Slider Background is under them. So, to take advantage of the Slider Background, you need to create slides without a background. Although using semi-transparent background color on the slides help creating interesting layouts.

8. Control variables

Controls in Smart Slider are generally used for navigation. For example, we consider the arrows, thumbnails and bullets as controls. By default when you select a control you can choose from 12 positions, such as top left, bottom middle and so on. These are fix positions, and actually are fine for most people.

However, using Control variables you get more positioning freedom. Additionally, you can position controls more precisely. Let’s say you create a Showcase slider and you want arrows. Using the default positions the arrows will display on the sides of the slider. Using Control variables the arrows can display next to the active slide.

9. Variable functions

Variables are like placeholders. They tell Smart Slider what kind of content you want the layer to display. For example, you can select the title variable to display the title of the post. There’s also a variable that contains the content of your post.

That’s the basic usage of variables. When you create a dynamic slide, you might want a more advanced usage. For example, you want to display a short introduction of the post in your post slider. You can split the content and display, for example, the first 300 characters only. If you don’t use the featured image of the post (or don’t want to use that in the slider), you can look for an image in any variable.

10. Hiding layers in dynamic slides based on another variable

Smart Slider makes it easy for you to enrich your site with a WooCommerce product slider. Have you ever wished your product slider would include an “on sale” badge for the products that are on sale? The “Hide when variable empty” option helps you achieve that. You can select any variable there and if it’s empty at the product that the slide displays, the layer will not show up. How cool is that?

Here’s a video that shows how the Hide when variable is empty feature works in a WooCommerce generator. There’s a Sale badge, that displays only at those products, which are on sale.

10+1. Slider export

Having a backup of your site is always crucial. There are many reasons why you might need to restore your site’s state. Also, there are many reasons when you want to restore a specific slider as well. You can create a backup of your sliders by exporting them and saving the .ss3 export file on your computer. Then you can restore this backup by importing the slider anytime later.

Conclusion

Nowadays it’s not easy to master any WordPress plugin, because they’re so feature rich. Plugin authors want more and more people to be able to use their product for their site. As a result, it can take time to get to know all features the plugins offer. In this article I’ve collected 10+1 Smart Slider features you probably didn’t know about. They can help you create better sliders and work faster. So, if you want to be a Smart Slider expert, it’s worth knowing them.

The post 10+1 Smart Slider Features You Probably Didn’t Know About appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/dynamic-slider/ Tue, 19 May 2020 06:30:17 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=21154 Do you run a WordPress website that is constantly publishing new content or selling new products? A dynamic slider might be just the design element you need to help you save time and ensure your content is always fresh for your site visitors. If you’ve been thinking about adding a dynamic slider to your WordPress […]

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

]]> Do you run a WordPress website that is constantly publishing new content or selling new products? A dynamic slider might be just the design element you need to help you save time and ensure your content is always fresh for your site visitors.

If you’ve been thinking about adding a dynamic slider to your WordPress site, this post is for you. We’ll look at how you can add one to your site with the Smart Slider 3 plugin, along with examples to inspire you.

What is a Dynamic Slider?

A dynamic slider is a type of slider that automatically pulls in content from a particular source, such as a YouTube channel, WordPress blog, WooCommerce store, and more. For example, If you run a travel blog, you might want to display your latest blog posts on your homepage. With a dynamic slider, you can choose to pull in content from your WordPress site and display a slideshow of your latest posts — all without having to touch jQuery, HTML, JS or CSS.

Similarly, a photographer might want to dynamically display photos pulled from a specific folder, and a WooCommerce store owner might want to display a carousel of products on sale.

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.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/post-slider/ Tue, 05 May 2020 12:30:42 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=17813 Post Sliders are very useful and effective parts of your website. They show all the recent and trending posts to catch the visitors’ attention, and they encourage your visitors to spend more time on your blog. A nice looking Post Slider can be a great addition to every WordPress site. Have you thought of creating […]

The post Enrich your Blog with a Post Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Post Sliders are very useful and effective parts of your website. They show all the recent and trending posts to catch the visitors’ attention, and they encourage your visitors to spend more time on your blog. A nice looking Post Slider can be a great addition to every WordPress site.

Have you thought of creating a Post Slider? Smart Slider 3 is the best choice to create one: it is free, fully customizable and responsive. Read the article and start creating your beautiful slider!

What is a Post Slider?

With a Post Slider you can show a part of your post in your slider like the title, the featured image, a short description and a button which navigates you directly to the post. With a slider you can grab your visitors’ attention and you can collect your posts into one place as well. It’s up to you what you want to show: the latest post, a post in a certain category, or a post by custom fields.

It’s nice if a post slider updates itself automatically so you don’t have to make the changes yourself. For any serious blogger, it’s highly recommended to use a Post Slider to enrich their blog.

A long time ago WordPress was only a blogging platform, but today it’s the most popular multipurpose CMS. There are still huge amount of blog sites using WordPress, because it’s easy to install, learn and use, and it has all the features a blogger needs to have a nice and content rich blog. Despite how great the core features are, it’s worth mentioning how easy it is to extend them. There are various plugins which are easy to install so you can get more features for your site. For instance, there are plugins which help you create a WordPress Slider.

With Smart Slider 3 you can easily set up a dynamic slider, and you can create your Post Slider with a few clicks.

Why is Smart Slider 3 the best tool to create a Post Slider?

Smart Slider 3 is an easy to use WordPress plugin, it is user friendly and fully customizable. It’s the perfect choice for creating simple image sliders which look great on any site. For easy navigation you can create a thumbnail slider, and besides that, you can create even a WordPress carousel. If you have pages or posts, and you would like to highlight them in a slider, this plugin is the best choice for you.

If you searched in the WP plugins directory earlier, you may have found a lot of slider plugins. Why should you choose Smart Slider 3? Because with Smart Slider 3 you can set up your layout, you can create a free full width slider, it is fully responsive, and has more features than some advanced post slider plugins.

Smart Slider 3 has a layer based slide building system, you can simply build your own layer slider. This system makes it easy to manage your content and create a fantastic look. The actual building experience is simple and it feels like using a page builder. You can build amazing content sliders in minutes and tell your story the way you want to. You can customize every layer, change their font size and family, color, background or what you want.

Create Dynamically Changing Slider

If this wasn’t enough, Smart Slider 3 has yet another amazing feature, the Dynamic Slide Generator. This feature allows you to create slides from your WordPress posts, which will dynamically change. This means that content of each slide comes from your posts, so there is no duplicated content, and if you make any changes in the post content, the slider will follow it.

Of course, you can create unlimited number of dynamic slide generators and specify the number of posts for each. By the way, Smart Slider 3 can create a custom post type slider as well. You have access to all content of your post: the featured image, the actual content, the URL, the post title, the categories, the tags, and you can create any layers to show them.

How to Create a WordPress Post Slider with Smart Slider 3?

You can create your own Post Slider already in the free version of Smart Slider 3. All you need is to create a dynamic slide, set the number how many slides you want to appear in the slider, and set up the generator.

A post slider can be useful if you would like to feature some posts and show the latest with the selected category. In the free version you can display posts by filter or by an ID. The Pro version has more opportunities, you can create dynamic sliders from custom post types as well.

After you have set up your dynamic post generator, you can replace the layers with variables, which will automatically refresh. You can use a lot of variables like the title or the date, also you can limit the showing characters. This limitation can be useful at the descriptions, and each slide will have a same length text on them.

Use a Slider Example in your Dynamic Slider

In Smart Slider 3 you can choose from more predefined slider examples which you can use in your dynamic sliders. All you need is to copy the layout, paste it into your dynamic slide and replace the layers with variables.

Why to use a Post Slider on your Page?

• You can create your Post Slider for free. What’s even more, the free version of Smart Slider 3 allows you to create unlimited number of unique sliders. Give it a try!
• You can catch the visitors’ attention. Use it as a homepage slider, put a call to action button on it, and navigate to your post.
• The content can dynamically change. You create it once, and if you create a new post, your slider will refresh automatically.
• Highlight certain content. You can show your latest post in recognizable place.
• It does not take up much space. There can be more posts on one slider which you can save space with.

Final Thoughts

Post sliders aren’t limited only to WordPress, you can create a Joomla article slider as well. Creating a slider from your articles isn’t the only dynamic functionality of Smart Slider 3. In the Pro version you can choose from a lot of generator types, you can create a product slider from your WooCommerce products, display your upcoming events, or show your latest Facebook post.

The post Enrich your Blog with a Post Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/image-slider/ Tue, 31 Mar 2020 13:10:22 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=15255 Using an Image slider is one of the most popular ways to display multiple images on your website. These galleries are so popular it’s hard to find a WordPress site where isn’t some kind of image carousel. Because of this, there are many free responsive slider plugins available for creating an image slider. What is […]

The post How to Create Beautiful Responsive Image Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Using an Image slider is one of the most popular ways to display multiple images on your website. These galleries are so popular it’s hard to find a WordPress site where isn’t some kind of image carousel. Because of this, there are many free responsive slider plugins available for creating an image slider.

What is an image slider in WordPress?

Image sliders are a nice and convenient way to display many images on your WordPress site. Beautiful images, which are relevant to your site can draw more visitors to your site. Creating an image slider in WordPress is quite an easy task, you just need a good responsive slider plugin.

How to create a responsive image slider?

First, you need to find a good slider plugin. This is probably the hardest step here as you’ll need a plugin, which is easy to use. Your slider plugin also needs to have all features you need. Want to add captions to your image slides? The plugin you pick needs to be able to do that. Do you have coding knowledge? If not, you should look for a plugin where you can build everything visually. To save you from having to look for responsive slider plugins, let me suggest giving Smart Slider 3 a try.

What is Smart Slider 3?

It’s a free slider plugin which you can use to create beautiful sliders. The slider is cross browser, which means desktop browsers are supported. And, of course, the sliders will look great on mobile devices.

Once you have a good image slider plugin at your disposal, you’ve done the hardest part. Now all you need is a set of beautiful images and effective captions. Probably you already have your images ready. If you don’t have images yet, you can get high quality, royalty free images from the following sources: Unsplash, Pixabay, Pexels. Be sure to use properly sized, quality images. Your visitors won’t like blurry or badly cropped images. You should also forget about using images which have heavy watermark.

Why should you choose Smart Slider 3 as your image slider solution?

Smart Slider 3 is a premium-like slider plugin, which has an excellent free version. This free version lets you create beautiful image sliders, even with thumbnail images. The big and small images will look nice on every device, which is essential for every website. Smart Slider 3 perfectly integrates with your WordPress site. The interface where you create your sliders is modern and clean. The slider allows you to create unlimited photo sliders and add unlimited images to each slider. You can choose the photos from the WordPress Media Library directly. Then you can set up the slider the way you want it to.

What’s even more, Smart Slider 3 cares about your SEO as well. You can enter the alt description to each added image. Specify the alt at the WordPress media library and Smart Slider loads it when you select the image. Search engines, like Google can easily pick up this alt text. Any other textual content you put on the slider is also crawlable for search engines.

Why should you use thumbnails for navigation?

When an image slider has a lot of photos, it’s hard to reach the desired image fast. While arrow navigation is a common feature for image sliders, it’s not so convenient to reach the last image. The problem with arrows is that the visitor has no idea how many images there are for them to see. Thumbnails do this job nicely and easily while improving the slider’s overall look.

Thumbnails are great for navigation. They make it easy for the visitor to look through the available photos. (Without having to check the images one by one.) Hence they can quickly reach the image they would like to see in the gallery. You can customize the thumbnails to match your site’s layout. By default, the slide background image is used at the thumbnail, but you can upload a custom image.

Boost your image slider with lightbox

You don’t always have enough space on your site to create a large slider. So not every image can show up in it’s full size, the way it could be enjoyed the most. This means you need to make compromises when it comes to your slider size. But you want to allow your visitors to see the large images so you are looking for a lightbox.

The lightbox allows the visitor to click on the image and view it in a larger size. Smart Slider 3 Pro makes it easy to add lightbox, it just takes a couple of clicks. The lightbox you create can show more than just one image, it can be an image gallery as well. You are able to select many images and even switch them without user action. The lightbox supports adding videos from YouTube, Vimeo or your on site as well. You can also create a lightbox slider from your slider background images.

Engage your visitors with a wonderful image carousel

Showing one large image in the slider is good for most cases. But from time to time this kind of simple image slideshow isn’t enough to meet your needs. Smart Slider 3 won’t take away your chance to make your image slider original. It offers not only one, but two options to show more slides at a time. Both the Showcase and the Carousel sliders are responsive and look great on any device. You can even make them full width to fill the entire browser width.

Either the Showcase or the Carousel slider is great to show more images to the visitor. Both allow the visitor to see every image fast. The main difference between these sliders is their responsiveness. When you view a Showcase gallery on a smaller device, you see the same amount of slides, just smaller while a Carousel shows less images without changing their size. Another difference is that Carousel switches all of the visible slides at once. Hence, visitors can view the pictures quicker.

Spectacular image slideshow effects

There are many ways to make your simple image slider more interesting. For instance, you can add eye-catching image effects to your slider. These effects will help catch the visitor’s attention and make them spend more time viewing your slider. Smart Slider 3 has a great number of effects you can choose from. Some effects are available in the free version of Smart Slider 3, but some are premium features. So, what are the best and most popular effects you can use? Let’s check them out!

Background animations

One of the best ways to enhance your image slider is to select a nice looking background animation. The background animation occurs on the slides while they’re changing. For example, when you go from slide one to slide two. Using Background animations you can enhance your slider but let the visitor’s focus on the actual image. Smart Slider 3 has several predefined background animations to choose from. There’s two main categories, vertical and horizontal. Each contains a large list of possible effects, including the new slices animation.

Ken Burns Effect

If you choose Smart Slider 3 as your image slider plugin, background animation won’t be the only way to boost your slider. The ever popular Ken Burns Effect is available in Smart Slider 3. If you haven’t heard the name of the effect yet, let me introduce it to you in a few words. Ken Burns slider effect is an astonishing panning and zooming effect. This simple but elegant effect adds a nice touch to your slider background images immediately.

Parallax Slider Effect

The Parallax Slider Effect creates the illusion of depth inside your image slider. The effect activates when visitors start scrolling down on the website. The content will move regularly, but the slide background will stay a little bit behind. The result is astonishing and people will love the result. The best part is how easy it is to add the parallax effect to your images with Smart Slider 3.

Moreover, you can use the parallax effect on layers as well. This lets you jump on the creative wagon and create spectacular effects. You can create image or textual layers, add the parallax effect and get a bunch of amazed visitors.

Create an image slider quickly and easily

Selecting the images from the WordPress Media Library is fairly easy and it’s the common approach to add images to the sliders. Although it might not be so convenient if you have many photos. If you have lots of images, you will need to select the images one by one inside your Media Library. Luckily, Smart Slider 3 has a great feature called dynamic slide generator. This feature can create slides dynamically from various sources. The most popular source is the WordPress post, but the RSS and social generators are popular as well.

There’s an “Images from folder” generator, which allows you to select a folder on your site. This folder has the images you want to create a slider from. Apart from selecting the image folder, the process is totally automatic. The slider picks up the images without you having to change anything. Even if you add new images later, or remove old ones, they’ll show up in the slider. After a given time you can change, the slider looks for new images in the folder to display them.

There are many other dynamic slide generators available. For example, you can create a slider from your Flickr or Pinterest images. Just set up the dynamic slide once. After that, the slider will continue fetching the new images all by itself.

The post How to Create Beautiful Responsive Image Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

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