Articles in Overview Tag — Blog — Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin Extending the world of WordPress and Joomla. Take your website to the next level with our plugins. Download Smart Slider 3 today and get started building beautiful sliders with confidence using our advanced editor. Wed, 03 Jan 2024 14:05:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 10 Best WordPress AI Plugins to Try in 2024 https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-wordpress-ai-plugins/ Wed, 03 Jan 2024 08:00:09 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=56298 We all know that it’s important to keep up with the constantly changing world of web development if you want to have a successful online presence. Luckily, WordPress users have a chance to take advantage of the latest technologies by incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their websites. AI has become a total game-changer in recent […]

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We all know that it’s important to keep up with the constantly changing world of web development if you want to have a successful online presence. Luckily, WordPress users have a chance to take advantage of the latest technologies by incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their websites.

AI has become a total game-changer in recent times, bringing fresh and creative solutions to make tasks easier, enhance user experiences, and boost website performance. In 2024, the integration of AI into WordPress is even more exciting than before. There are a bunch of incredible AI plugins ready to revolutionize the way we create and engage with websites. So let’s take a dive into the world of AI plugins for WordPress in 2024.

📚 Table of contents

🤖 1. AI Engine Plugin
📈 2. Rank Math SEO
🧞‍♂️ 3. GetGenie
🎨 4. Elemenentor AI
🌟 5. Divi AI
⚙️ 6. Uncanny Automator
💻 7. CodeWP AI
💬 8. Tidio Live Chat
📚 9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
🔗 10. Link Whisper
💡 Conclusion

1. AI Engine Plugin

AI Engine Plugin
Download

On our journey through the world of AI-powered WordPress plugins, we can’t miss the AI Engine Plugin. This plugin is causing quite a stir in the WordPress community as it brings the power of artificial intelligence right to your website.

What is the AI Engine Plugin?

Imagine having your own virtual assistant right in your WordPress dashboard. Thanks to the AI Engine Plugin, that’s exactly what you’ll have. This plugin provides a WordPress-focused AI experience that can help you improve and manage your website in countless ways.

To get started, simply get an open AI key and add it to the plugin’s settings. This will enable you to unlock the true power of the plugin.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Virtual Assistant: The AI Engine Plugin offers a virtual assistant that focuses on tasks specific to WordPress. It’s like having your own personal helper right on your dashboard, ready to answer any questions you may have.
  • Prompts and Templates: It provides a wide range of prompts and templates to assist you in creating AI-optimized and generated content. This means that you can say goodbye to writer’s block.
  • Image Generator: Its image-generating feature is definitely one of its most exciting features. With just a few text prompts you can create stunning images. Once you are happy with the generated image, you can personalize it by adding a catchy title, a captivating caption, a detailed description, and even some alt text. And the cherry on top is that you can instantly add it to your WordPress media gallery or simply download it for offline use.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $49/year for one website

Don’t worry we’re just scratching the surface with this plugin. Keep reading to discover even more amazing AI tools that will take your website to the next level.

2. Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO Plugin
Download

In our search for the top AI plugins for WordPress in 2024, we stumbled upon the famous Rank Math SEO plugin. This plugin has been a favorite among SEO enthusiasts for quite some time, but now it’s made it to our list thanks to its impressive new AI capabilities. These features are designed to give you even more control over the on-page SEO of your website.

What is the Rank Math SEO Plugin?

Rank Math SEO is well-known for being a great SEO plugin. But what sets it apart from other WordPress AI plugins is its incorporation of cutting-edge AI features that are designed to make your on-page SEO even more efficient.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Content AI Integration: After you’ve got the Rank Math SEO up and running, it’s time to explore its powerful Content AI. With this awesome feature, you can easily boost your content‘s SEO elements, like headings, links, and overall optimize for SEO, by just asking its Content AI to generate it.
  • SEO Keywords: Its Content AI is a great tool to add SEO keywords to your pages and optimize your content for search engines. You’ll get a detailed analysis of your page’s content. This analysis will help you identify areas for improvement and boost your page’s search engine ranking.
  • Providing Insights: Rank Math SEO’s AI capabilities are not limited to analyzing your content alone. It can also help you analyze your competition by providing valuable insights like CPC and search volume data for your chosen keyword. With this information, you can make better decisions about your content strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
  • Content Optimization Recommendations: It has a bunch of SEO suggestions as well, that can help you improve your content’s visibility on search engines. It recommends extra keywords, while also improving headings, word count, and more, all to boost the overall quality of your content.
  • Link Suggestions: It makes sure that your content has reliable sources and boosts its credibility and relevance.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $59/year for unlimited websites

3. GetGenie

GetGenie AI Plugin
Download

GetGenie is an exceptional writing companion that we discovered during our exploration of WordPress AI plugins. It isn’t just any ordinary writing tool, it’s an AI assistant that’s been carefully created to take your content writing skills to the next level.

What is the GetGenie Plugin?

This AI assistant is designed to help content creators in producing high-quality, unique blog posts quickly. It’s got you covered whether you’re a beginner or an advanced writer.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Templates: GetGenie offers a wide range of templates to choose from, with more than 30 options available. These templates are designed to fit different content frameworks, providing you with guidance. By using these templates, you can ensure that your content follows these proven structures and have maximum impact.
  • On-page SEO Scores: It gives you live on-page SEO scores, giving you immediate feedback on how well your content is optimized for search engines.
    Genie Mode: With it, you can effortlessly create content by using prompts and get detailed responses in return. It can be a game-changer for anyone looking to create content quickly and effectively.
  • GenieChat: GetGenie takes it a step further with the introduction of “GenieChat”. It’s a chatting platform that allows you to have human-like conversations with 22 unique personalities. This not only adds a personal touch to your content creation but also opens up exciting opportunities for interaction.
  • Competitor Data Analysis: GetGenie goes beyond content creation by providing competitor data analysis. Which means that it shows you valuable insight to stay ahead in your niche.
  • Generate Ideas: Looking for some inspiration as a blogger? GetGenie is the perfect tool to generate ideas and ignite your creativity. It’s designed to help you uncover new and exciting topics to write about.
  • Multilingual Content: Easily create content in various languages and broaden your audience.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $19/month for unlimited websites

4. Elemenentor AI

Elementor AI Plugin
Download

Going further on this journey of exploring the top WordPress AI plugins, we’ve come across the game-changing Elelementor AI. This AI solution is seamlessly integrated into the popular Elementor page and website builder plugin.

What is the Elementor AI Plugin?

Elementor is one of the best page and website builders for WordPress. And now with the addition of Elementor AI, it’s taking a huge step into the future of website creation. Its main focus is on transforming website creation, optimization, and design processes.
Let’s explore the amazing features that make Elementor AI a must-have for Elementor users.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Custom Code Snippets: With Elementor AI, you can easily create custom HTML and CSS code snippets without any coding skills. This feature allows you to enhance and personalize your Elementor website effortlessly, even if you are not a coding expert.
  • Content Creation and Optimization: Elementor AI is the perfect writing assistant for all your content creation and optimization needs. Whether you are creating new content or rewriting existing text within the Elementor page builder, you can easily shorten, extend, or check the grammar or spelling of it. With Elementor AI you can do all this within the familiar interface of the Elementor plugin.
  • Multilingual: Elementor AI is a game-changer when it comes to language diversity. With its amazing multilingual capabilities, it effortlessly translates text into more than 20 languages in real time.
  • Module-Specific Prompts: These prompts adapt to the specific Elementor module you are using. So if you are working with a heading module, the prompts will be different compared to when you are using a text block module. This personalized help from its AI helps you create impactful content for each module, which ultimately assists you in improving your website1s overall impact.

Pricing:

  • Free trial available
  • Paid plans start at $35.88/year for unlimited websites

5. Divi AI

Divi AI Plugin
Download

Divi AI completely changes the game when it comes to creating websites on WordPress. It’s not just a helpful tool, it completely reinvents how websites are imagined and brought into existence.

What is the Divi AI Plugin?

Divi AI takes your web design experience to the next level by seamlessly integrating with Divi, a popular WordPress theme and page builder while adding the power of artificial intelligence to the mix.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Content Writing Tool: It has launched an impressive content-writing tool, that allows users to create website content with ease. With just one click, you can generate text content for your website, whether you are starting from scratch or improving existing content. Divi AI offers prompts and suggestions to make our workflow smoother.
  • Image Generation: Divi AI offers image generation features, letting users create stunning visuals for their websites with ease. With built-in style prompts, the generated images are guaranteed to match the desired aesthetic.
  • Analyzes Website: It learns from your website, by analyzing the information available on your website and pages. This way it can produce highly accurate and relevant results.

Pricing:

  • Free trial available
  • Paid plans start at $24/month ($18/month if paid yearly)

6. Uncanny Automator

Uncanny Automator Plugin
Download

Let’s explore the world of automation with the remarkable Uncanny Automator, as we continue our search for the top WordPress AI plugins. This plugin is like Zapier for WordPress, allowing you to automate a wide range of tasks by connecting your WordPress site, plugins, and apps. And now with the integration of artificial intelligence, it’s even more powerful than ever before.

What is the Uncanny Automator Plugin?

Uncanny Automator is a powerful automation tool that makes it easy for your WordPress site, plugins, and third-party services to communicate seamlessly. It ensures that all the different parts of your WordPress setup work together smoothly.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Extensive Plugin Integrations: It’s the ultimate connector for your WordPress ecosystem, with support for more than 100 plugins and third-party services. It acts as a universal translator, allowing smooth communication between various tools.
  • No-Code Visual Builder: It’s one of its most outstanding features. With its user-friendly interface, creating recipes and automating tasks has never been easier. You can integrate AI into your WordPress workflow without any complex coding, thanks to the simple drag-and-drop feature.
  • Dealy and Scheduling Automation: It brings in a touch of flexibility. With this feature, you can ensure that tasks are carried out at the perfect time, enabling you to enhance the efficiency of managing your website.
  • Dynamic Content: You can make use of dynamic content from different sources such as user-generated data and other generated content. This guarantees that your website’s automation process can easily adapt to the changing needs of your website.
  • OpenAI Integration: Uncanny Automator made a huge step in integrating with OpenAI, which allows you to bring its incredible capabilities to your WordPress site. With the help of recipes, you can effortlessly integrate AI into different parts of your website management.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $199/year

7. CodeWP AI

CodeWP AI Plugin
Download

We have arrived at a special place for WordPress developers. CodeWP AI is specifically designed for those who navigate the coding realm of WordPress.

What is the CodeWP AI Plugin?

This coding assistant is a powerful accessory that provides assistance with PHP and JS, making code creation easier and solving complex tasks that could otherwise take up hours of your time.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Dozens of AI Modes: It goes beyond generic assistance and caters to the specific needs of WordPress developers. With dozens of finely tuned AI modes, the plugin is designed to provide accurate and high-quality code snippets. Whether you are using specific plugins, page builders, or products, CodeWP AI has got you covered with its wide range of AI modes.
  • Compatible with Page Builders: CodeWP AI is built to be compatible with all the major plugins and page builders.
  • Tutorials: Looking for guidance? CodeWp AI has a wide range of expertly crafted tutorials made just for you.
  • Example Snippets: It comes with a wide range of example snippets, which gives you tested and proven code snippets to easily integrate into your projects.
  • General Functions: It provides you with various general functions that can be applied in different scenarios. Additionally, it offers specialized AI modes that are specifically designed for specific tasks. This means that whether you’re dealing with a common challenge or a specialized task, CodeWP AI’s got your back.
  • Designed for WordPress Users: CodeWP AI is not your average coding assistant. It’s tailored to meet the needs of WordPress users, making it a smart and effective tool for those who use WordPress on a regular basis.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $96/year

8. Tidio Live Chat

Tidio Live Chat Plugin
Download

Tidio live chat is a game-changer in the world of WordPress communication solutions. It’s an all-in-one tool that revolutionizes customer service and boosts sales. It goes beyond being a simple chat plugin, it brings a new era to your website’s customer service.

What is the Tidio Live Chat Plugin?

It offers various communication channels and makes use of chatbots. Let’s explore its standout features that make it a force to be reckoned with.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Everything in One Place: It makes communication a breeze by bringing all channels together in one easy-to-use dashboard. Whether it’s live chat, email, or messaging apps, Tidio guarantees seamless management of all your needs.
  • Templates: Its chatbot templates are the perfect way to boost user engagement. You can find a variety of options from cart-saving prompts to personalized interactions with returning customers. These templates are designed to take your customers’ experience to the next level.
  • Drag-and-Drop Editor: Its chatbot editor lets you customize chatbots effortlessly. It has an intuitive interface where you can easily modify the existing templates or create chatbots from scratch.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): Its chatbots are equipped with NLP technology that allows them to recognize commonly used words and answer basic customer questions. This feature ensures it’s delivering fast and accurate responses.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $29/month

9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Download

YARPP, also known as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, is a must-have tool for WordPress website owners who want to boost their engagement and extend the reach of their content. With YARPP, you can increase page views and create a more captivating browsing experience for your visitors.

What is the YARPP?

This amazing WordPress plugin showcases visitors with related posts, pages, and custom post types. It uses advanced algorithms to connect them to content all over your website.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Advanced Algorithms: YARPP uses advanced algorithms that guarantee that users are presented with posts, pages, and custom post types that are relevant to your initial entries. This watching enhances the users’ experience by making it more personalized and captivating.
  • Built-In Caching: It boosts performance by including its own catching system. This optimization guarantees that relevant posts are quickly delivered, resulting in a smooth browsing experience for your readers.
  • Placement Options: With YARPP, you have the freedom to choose from a variety of placement options for displaying your related content.
  • Templates: It makes it easy to showcase related content with its pre-built templates. These can effortlessly display your posts in a visually appealing way, adding a touch of style to your website.
  • Language Compatibility: YARPP is built to be language-friendly, allowing it to work seamlessly with websites in different languages. This way everyone around the world can enjoy the advantages of these related posts.
  • Customizable: YARPP provides customization options, which makes it easy for website owners to personalize the look and positions of their related posts. This allows them to match it to their site’s design and enhance the overall user experience.
  • Free Access to Essential Features: It offers free access to all essential features, making it an affordable and effective solution for anyone looking to make use of related content without extra expenses.

Pricing:

  • Free

Link Whisper Plugin
Download

Link Whisperer is truly a game-changer in the world of website optimization. It offers a simple and user-friendly solution to the problem of creating impactful internal links in your content.

What is the Internal Linking Plugin?

The proper positioning of internal links is not just to keep users engaged, but it also has a huge impact on improving SEO rankings. Link Whisper’s AI-driven plugin competently transforms this procedure by effortlessly going through your content and suggesting relevant links.

Key Features and Functionalities

  • Link Suggestions: Link Whisper’s advanced AI features simplify internal linking by analyzing website content and providing relevant posts and link suggestions. This gets rid of the need for manual link creation, saving us valuable time and improving our internal linking strategy.
  • Link Reporting: Besides suggestions, it lets you know about broken links and 404 errors, contributing to overall site health.
  • Customize Recommendations: Users can customize link recommendations by selecting the keywords they find relevant. This gives full control over how internal links match with each content piece.
  • User-Friendly Interface: Their platform is created with the goal of catering to website owners of all technical backgrounds, so everyone can benefit from their services.

Pricing:

  • Free version available
  • Paid plans start at $77/year for one site

Conclusion

As we come to the end of our exploration of AI plugins for WordPress it’s clear that the future of web development is here, and it’s smarter, more efficient, and more exciting than ever.

We’ve explored a wide range of plugins, each with its own special touch. From plugins that use AI to create content and generate images, to those that combat spam and provide helpful suggestions for internal links, these plugins are overlooked champions of the WordPress world.

If you’re an experienced developer exploring coding with CodeWP or just a casual user looking for a friendly chatbot companion with Tidio live Chat, there’s an AI plugin designed for everyone. These plugins go beyond mere functionality, they enhance your WordPress experience and make it truly remarkable.

These plugins are more than just extras, they are the secret ingredient that can elevate your website from average to exceptional.

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Year in Review: 2021 https://smartslider3.com/blog/year-in-review-2021/ Mon, 03 Jan 2022 06:00:12 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=44469 This year was anything but normal; we had to find new ways to work, and continue doing what we love. Although it’s hard to keep track of all changes that happened this year, I decided to give it a try anyway. First of all, we’re happy to announce that a new face joined our team […]

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This year was anything but normal; we had to find new ways to work, and continue doing what we love. Although it’s hard to keep track of all changes that happened this year, I decided to give it a try anyway. First of all, we’re happy to announce that a new face joined our team this year to help with the development and support of our softwares.

But before anything else I would like to thank all of our customers (that’s you!) who use Smart Slider on all their clients’ websites! Thanks for allowing us to be a part of your year! We’re thrilled by the amount of positive feedback we receive from you and it helps us to continue and make our plugin better and better.

Now let’s take a look back at what we’ve accomplished over this year.

Overview

In this section I’ll try to gather the most interesting statistics, numbers and insights about how we did as a company in the past 365 days.

  • Updates: In 2021 we’ve released 1 major and 17 minor updates to Smart Slider.
  • Blog: We’ve released a total of 15 articles in 2021 which helped us get lots of new visitors from organic sources. Our goal for 2022 is to increase our content output while maintaining the same high quality so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
  • YouTube: We’ve created a total of 10 new videos in 2021. Two of these videos are part of our How To Build series, which focuses on building template sliders from scratch. Three of the videos are related to the new layers added this year, and the others are more generic tutorials.
  • New Template Page: Smart Slider has many amazing slider templates. We’ve rebuilt the template page to make it more modern and added the most needed search feature.

Smart Slider

Smart Slider 3 is our flagship product, and currently it’s running on 800,000+ WordPress websites. It’s the fastest growing slider plugin in the WordPress repository. Here’s a quick summary of our biggest releases from the last 12 months:

  • Smart Slider 3.5 – Blazar: A major update bringing you the best frontend performance possible. This new update helps make the slider load faster, and you can get a better score in Google PageSpeed Insights as well.
  • Slider Templates: In 2021 we’ve created 23 brand new slider templates for you to use. Additionally, we’ve improved the description of every template, so they now highlight the most important features you can find in the slider.
  • Morph and Distortion animations: Today’s modern websites call for modern effects and animations. The Morph and Distortion animations help you create that sophisticated look for your site.
  • Before After effect: After the amazing performance improvements we’ve managed to find the time to add a few new layers. One of these was the Before After layer, which helps you add the popular before-after effect to your slider.
  • Countdown Layer: The Countdown layer helps you count down to a specific date, such as the opening of your site, the start or end of a sale and much more. It opens up many doors to create things with Smart Slider that were not possible before.
  • Gutenberg Block improvements: Gutenberg is aiming to be the best WordPress editor with its flexibility and fast loading speed. We’ve made some improvements in the way our Gutenberg block behaves, so the experience is more fluid. Also, directly from the block you can go to the Slider settings page and edit the published slider.

What’s Coming Next Year?

We promise to bring you incredible updates that aim at making your lives easier through simplified WordPress and Joomla website building. We couldn’t be more excited for 2022 and you’ll really like the features we have in the pipeline. But here’s a list of our public roadmap:

  • Dashboard improvements: Smart Slider is a super versatile tool, and many people create lots of sliders using it. After some time the Dashboard can be crowded making it hard to find sliders. We’re working on some major features to improve your experience. We’re planning to add a search and a paginator to the Dashboard.
  • Instagram generator: We were super excited to learn that after Facebook had taken over Instagram, they made improvements to the Instagram API. As a result, it became possible to create an Instagram generator which will help you pull your images on Instagram directly to your slider.
  • New Shape Dividers: Shape Dividers are a trend. They look cool and modern and allow you to create seamless transitions between sections of your site. So we decided to add a couple of new Shape Dividers to choose from. This will help you find the perfect shape for your website.
  • Lottie integration: Lottie is a modern way to show animations on your site. We’re excited to bring the possibilities of Lottie to Smart Slider!

As always, we love hearing what you’d like from us next year. Your thoughts directly influence what we decide to work on, so please fill out our quick survey to help us meet your expectations in an even better way.

What should we focus on next? Please fill out our quick survey!

Take The 2 Minutes Survey

Final thoughts

2021 was a super busy year for us. We’ve had fantastic growth and I’m really proud of the work we’ve done. We have high plans for the future, so stay tuned, because many cool things are coming! Once again, from all our team: Thank you for your support and we’ll see you in 2022! 🎉

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Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor? https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-theme-for-elementor/ Wed, 08 Apr 2020 11:00:37 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=19841 Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress. It powers more than 5 million WordPress websites all around the world. Due to the nature of WordPress, even the best page builders need a theme as their canvas. For this reason, there are thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from. Now there’s a new […]

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Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress. It powers more than 5 million WordPress websites all around the world. Due to the nature of WordPress, even the best page builders need a theme as their canvas. For this reason, there are thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from. Now there’s a new challenger in town who wants to be the best theme for Elementor.

Meet Hello Theme, Elementor’s first theme. Since they know Elementor better than anyone else, they could create a theme that lets the user make the most of it. As a result, they created a theme that lets you build beautiful websites using Elementor. Additionally, the theme you use won’t get into your design’s way anymore. In fact, they claim this is the best theme for Elementor. Is that true? Let’s find out!

What is Hello Elementor theme?

Hello Elementor Theme Preview

Download Hello Elementor Theme
Hello Elementor is a minimal and lightweight WordPress theme. Its main purpose is to be fast and work with Elementor as good as possible. When you work with Elementor on Hello theme, you can focus on designing the pages. In fact, you don’t have to worry about the theme getting in the way of your gorgeous design ideas. Since it doesn’t have many features, it doesn’t have much code, which makes it fast. As a result, Hello Elementor might just be the best theme for Elementor.

What are the best themes for Elementor?

Best themes for Elementor: Hello Elementor, Astra, OceanWP, GeneratePress

Elementor works with any WordPress theme you can find. Despite this, there are three best themes for Elementor which developers love to use the most. The themes people particularly love are: Astra, OceanWP, and GeneratePress. Not only they’re free themes, but they also power over 800.000 WordPress sites. Hello Elementor is here to challenge these super popular themes. It has a single goal, to be the best theme for Elementor while being the fastest one as well.

What do you need to know about Hello Elementor theme?

Hello Elementor is a clean and simple WordPress theme. As a result, it doesn’t offer many styling options. But that’s not a problem, because you can use Elementor to design every aspect of your website. As a matter of fact, without Elementor, you can only style your pages with custom CSS. For instance, there’s only one menu, but it has no styling. With Elementor Pro you can easily overcome this problem, though.

Although WordPress traditionally has sidebars, Hello Elementor doesn’t have any. If your layout relies on sidebars, Hello Elementor might not be the best theme for Elementor for you. However, you can install a plugin that lets you create sidebars if that’s what you need. Using Elementor’s Sidebar Widget, you can place these sidebars on any page.

While it works fine with the free version, at the end of the day, Hello Elementor feels like a theme for Elementor Pro. For instance, you can’t style the header menu at all without the Pro, unless you do custom coding. However, many people who use Elementor don’t want or don’t know how to do that. There’s nothing wrong with creating a theme for Elementor Pro, of course. But it might have been better to call Hello Elementor what it actually is: a theme for Elementor Pro.

How easy is it to switch to Hello Elementor from a different theme?

Hello Elementor is a lightweight theme, designed to be the best theme for Elementor. Because of this, it makes many people think about abandoning their current theme for its sake. You can switch to Hello Elementor the same way as you’d switch to any other theme. In other words, you need to check the new theme in a testing environment first.

It’s important to realize that Hello Elementor is only a blank canvas you can work with. It’s different from the other popular Elementor themes. Due to the fact that these themes offer more features without the need of Elementor. So you need to be ready to make some heavy changes to keep the look and feel of your site after the theme changes. As a result, you’ll get a simpler and much faster loading website.

Is Hello Elementor a worthy challenger for “the best theme for Elementor” title?

Hello Elementor’s main purpose is to give a blank canvas for Elementor page builder. As I’ve mentioned before, the same team is behind the Elementor and Hello Elementor. Hence you can expect the theme to remain compatible with Elementor for years to come. With this in mind it worth giving Hello Elementor a chance for your next project. As a result, you can reduce the possibility of a conflict between your theme and page builder. If that’s not a good reason to say Hello Elementor is the best theme for Elementor, I’m not sure what is.

Elementor is the most popular page builder plugin. Because of that, there are many other plugins extending it with extra functionality. For instance, there’s a plugin that adds post grid to Elementor. The theme is not only compatible with Elementor, but it also works with these plugins. So if you plan to use any of these plugins, feel confident that the theme won’t cause you trouble.

Is Hello theme the fastest Elementor theme?

You can’t tell how fast a theme is without actually testing it. To find out how fast Hello Elementor is, I’ve imported five Elementor demo templates. Then I loaded each page using Hello Elementor, OceanWP, Astra and GeneratePress. To make the text more interesting, I also added Twenty Nineteen to the mix.

I ran the tests on the same website, with no other plugins but Elementor Free. The only exception is OceanWP, where I also installed and activated Ocean Extra. The server I ran the tests on runs PHP 7.2.16. There wasn’t any caching either on server side or via a plugin. The internet speed was 10Mbit/s for each test. These are the results for each template.

Homepage – Restaurant

elementor restaurant
Elementor’s Homepage Restaurant demo was my first choice for the speed comparison. To begin with, it has lots of images and a couple of fancy effects, which makes it perfect for measuring speed. As you can see from the table below, Hello Elementor managed to outperform the four other themes. The second fastest was Twenty Nineteen, which might be a little bit surprising. GeneratePress finished in third place with four extra requests compared to Hello Elementor.

Hello Theme OceanWP Astra GeneratePress Twenty Nineteen
Requests 87 98 87 91 89
Page size 2.1MB 2.3MB 2.1MB 2.1MB 2.1MB
Load time 3.45s 3.85s 3.69s 3.64s 3.58s

Homepage – Fitness

elementor fitness
Homepage Fitness is a bit more lightweight template than the Restaurant one. Because of this, it’s perfect for a fast loading landing page. It’s not surprising that Hello Elementor was the fastest to load this page as well. GeneratePress and Astra earned the second and third place respectively.

Hello Theme OceanWP Astra GeneratePress Twenty Nineteen
Requests 42 51 43 45 44
Page size 960KB 1MB 972KB 976KB 985KB
Load time 2.37s 2.70s 2.41s 2.39s 2.43s

Landing Page – Vacation

elementor vacation
Header background videos are popular design choices on many websites. For this reason, it makes sense to test a template which is a similar design choice. Landing Page Vacation is a cool template which has a background video in its hero header. This time, Twenty Nineteen loaded the template the fastest. Hello Elementor was the second fastest, closely followed by Astra.

Hello Theme OceanWP Astra GeneratePress Twenty Nineteen
Requests 61 71 70 64 67
Page size 3.9MB 4MB 4.5MB 4MB 3.7MB
Load time 2.53s 2.88s 2.56s 2.88s 1.83s

Homepage – Agency

elementor agency
After testing a template with a video hero, I wanted to check a less content heavy template again. I’ve chosen Homepage Agency because of its modern look and few, but reasonable number of images. The results are quite similar to what we have got before. Hello Elementor is the first, Astra is the second and GeneratePress is the third.

Hello Theme OceanWP Astra GeneratePress Twenty Nineteen
Requests 54 62 55 57 56
Page size 734KB 829KB 746KB 740KB 759KB
Load time 1.99s 2.26s 2.01s 2.08s 2.11s

Product – App

elementor produc tapp
Product App template has very few images. As a result, it helps to get a better look at the actual speed of the theme. The speed test results aren’t so surprising. Hello Elementor is the fastest theme. The close second is Twenty Nineteen which managed to be faster than Astra by 0.02s.

Hello Theme OceanWP Astra GeneratePress Twenty Nineteen
Requests 47 55 47 49 48
Page size 1.1MB 1.2MB 1.1MB 1.1MB 1.1MB
Load time 2.31s 2.51s 2.36s 2.46s 2.34s

Speed result conclusion

Based on my tests, Hello Elementor is indeed the fastest theme for Elementor. Twenty Nineteen, another rather basic theme was the only one that could beat it. In the light of the results, it’s safe to say Hello Elementor is a great choice for any website. As a matter of fact, it might just be the best theme for Elementor.

Where could Hello Elementor improve to be the best theme for Elementor?

Hello Elementor is a minimal theme, which lets you design your whole site using Elementor. As a result, there are some significant disadvantages, which future updates might solve. Here’s a list of features I’m missing from Hello Elementor the most:

  • Global styling options. See, when you download a standalone theme, it has some basic styling. For instance, it sets font sizes, colors, line height and so for texts and headings. Hello Elementor lacks these features. Of course, you can always fix this via custom coding, but it would be nice not to have to do that.
  • Removing the page title. Not all pages need to have a visible title. This is especially true when you can’t even style them without custom coding. Because of that, an option would be nice to remove the title from the specific page. Currently, you can only hide it, but that happens with CSS. Additionally, the h1 tag stays there, which can make it difficult for you to do proper SEO. However, if you switch to canvas page template, you can get rid of the page title. But you’ll need to say goodbye to your header and footer, because it doesn’t support them.
  • Better usage of Customizer. All themes must be Customizer ready to be a part of WordPress.org’s theme collection. Because of that Hello Elementor uses Customizer, too. With this in mind, it would be great to have a couple of options here, such as some global styling, mentioned above.

In any case, Hello Elementor is a great theme, perhaps the best theme for Elementor. But it would be great to see either of these features in a future release. In the meantime, Hello Elementor remains your average, but speedy minimal WordPress theme.

How can you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor and Hello Elementor?

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated WordPress slider plugin. Moreover, it’s fully compatible with Elementor. As a result, you can add the sliders you created to Elementor using a special Smart Slider 3 widget. Since Hello Elementor relies on the page builder, Smart Slider 3 works with it as well. In case you haven’t used Smart Slider 3 yet, here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to display your slider.

Smart Slider 3 is a great choice to create beautiful sliders, especially, if you don’t have Elementor Pro. Even if you do have it, Smart Slider 3 has much more features compared to Elementor’s own solution. For instance, you can create gorgeous dynamic post sliders, even with the Free version.

Get Elementor Pro

Conclusion

Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t easy as there are so many themes to choose from. The final choice always depends on the project’s requirements and personal preferences. With this in mind, Hello Elementor is a great starter theme. It indeed suits well for most Elementor websites. In case it doesn’t suit yours, you can choose from the three most popular Elementor themes from above. They’re great, just like Hello Elementor, although maybe not as fast.

The post Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]>
GeneratePress and Smart Slider 3: The Beginner’s Guide https://smartslider3.com/blog/generatepress-slider/ Sun, 29 Mar 2020 07:00:29 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=10778 There has been a lot of talk about whether to use a slider or not. So, should you? Despite the fact I rarely use sliders, here’s my answer: if you want to use a slider, use it. Just be aware, your website visitors aren’t going to click with excitement on every slide one-by-one. So don’t […]

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There has been a lot of talk about whether to use a slider or not. So, should you? Despite the fact I rarely use sliders, here’s my answer: if you want to use a slider, use it. Just be aware, your website visitors aren’t going to click with excitement on every slide one-by-one. So don’t fall into the trap of publishing a slider on your homepage simply because your newly purchased multipurpose theme has several demo templates with it.

This is a guest post written by Klara Kalko, who is a freelance blogger at WP Metro. The opinions and ideas expressed herein are author’s own.

Better yet. Don’t use a slider with a multipurpose theme at all. Stick to a basic lightweight theme, such as GeneratePress, one of the best minimal and customizable free WordPress themes (read more about it below). It comes with detailed documentation and tutorial videos, so you will quickly figure out how to set up the theme. In the meantime, your visitors will appreciate the fast website and loading time.

WordPress sliders: consider or avoid?

Definitely an eye candy and an attention catcher, if used right, poorly designed slider along with average-quality content (remember, focus is designer’s best friend) will drive people away at the speed of light. Therefore, experiment, try different placement, show off only the best visual pieces you have. Last but not least, ask yourself what is the purpose of adding a slider and what exactly do you want to achieve with it.

Design is a form of a communication, so if you need a slider to communicate and interact with the visitor / user more effectively, go ahead. In other cases, you will end up using a slider for the sake of having one, which isn’t even an option.

Two things to keep in mind:

  • the fewer slides you have, the better
  • use only responsive WordPress slider plugins and always test your sliders on different devices. It saves your time and you won’t have to deal with disappointments.

Back in early 2017, my extremely critical point of view towards sliders came to an end when I discovered Smart Slider 3. It quickly became the only slider I really liked and made an exception for. Obviously, this is also the only standalone slider I recommend and use.

The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
Get Started
Smart Slider 3 - The new way to build a Slider

Best minimal and lightweight WordPress themes: GeneratePress

GeneratePress theme
The advantages of using a lightweight WordPress theme (such as a long-time favorite of mine, GeneratePress) instead of a heavy multipurpose one are hard to beat. Serving as a rock solid foundation for any website, GeneratePress delivers impressively fast performance, is responsive and very easy to customize. All theme options are integrated with the native WordPress customizer. It speeds up the theme’s setup and keeps it as simple as possible.

In fact, that was the very first reason I liked GeneratePress so much. The second reason is a modular structure: you can enable or disable theme features depending on your requirements.

In my opinion, every WordPress theme should be built that way.

Again, personal experience: I switched both of my websites to GeneratePress after almost one year of using one of the best multipurpose themes. Never looked back.

GeneratePress Premium Modules Overview

GeneratePress is a 100% free theme, but chances are, within 1 hour of using it you will want a premium modules bundle. GP Premium allows you to customize every part of the theme without adding custom CSS: colors, fonts, menu appearance, blog layout, backgrounds, copyright text and many others. You also get full access to the website templates library, permission to activate your license on unlimited websites and can easily export / import your GP settings.

As a WordPress theme, GeneratePress is a great choice for every category of WordPress users – from beginners to experienced developers: the theme has extensive selections of built-in hooks and filters. There’s only one thing that is just as great as GeneratePress itself – excellent and very helpful customer support (thanks to Tom Usborne, Leo and David Beckwith).

The theme has been chosen. Now let’s take a closer look at Smart Slider 3 and how you can easily design great-looking sliders with it.

Smart Slider 3: first steps

Smart Slider 3 is a really powerful, robust solution that can help you to implement almost any animation-related idea / scenario. Still, every advanced user at some point was a beginner, so let’s start with the basics. Guess what was the first thing I noticed immediately after installing and activating the slider?

The user interface of Smart Slider 3 is just as clean, beautiful and stylish as the sliders you can create with it. Options / settings are intuitive and easy to figure out, every icon seems to have a perfect placement and Smart Slider 3 is simple enough to use, even if you are an absolute beginner.

First things first. Free version of Smart Slider 3 is available on the WordPress plugin repository.

Don’t underestimate the prefix “free”, though – even the free version is packed with many great and quality features.

That alone makes free version of Smart Slider 3 a serious competitor, capable to rival premium sliders. In fact, Smart Slider 3 successfully does just that.

Using Smart Slider 3 with GeneratePress: best features + ways to use

Unlike heavy multipurpose themes, GeneratePress is minimal, lightweight and isn’t bundled with sliders or any additional plugins. For each project, you can choose required plugins on your own. Almost always, people want to have additional visual elements or add more interactivity to make their landing page stand out. Like I said, GeneratePress doesn’t have a built-in slider feature, so here’s what Smart Slider 3 can do for you.

Actually, it’s pretty much my list of favorite features – there are much more.

First and foremost: full integration with WordPress and smooth, bug-free compatibility with GeneratePress. For those who prefer working with page builders, Smart Slider 3 supports Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, SiteOrigin Page Builder and Visual Composer. Free version of Smart Slider 3 allows you to use your blog posts as a dynamic source for the slides.

If you are a designer, illustrator, photographer or filmmaker, Pro version offers something special for you – additional dynamic slide sources: Dribbble, Flickr, YouTube or more generic social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. With Smart Slider 3, you can connect your favorite social network to your website and design the landing page your way – the possibilities are very diversed and flexible.

Even WooCommerce is on the list, so you can design a beautiful landing page for your e-store. Designers and advanced users of Smart Slider 3 can hone their skills by trying to replicate UI / UX design animation. Both versions of Smart Slider 3 allow you to fully customize slider elements: arrows, bullets, thumbnails, slider autoplay and so on. Also, there’s a convenient font management system and integrated Google fonts.

Smart Slider 3 Template Library

Makes me stare. Seriously. Excellent showcase of what you can do with Smart Slider 3 and if you have Smart Slider 3 Pro, you can freely download / customize any of these beautiful templates. 100+ pre-designed slides, 11 of them are free. Filtered by categories, high-quality demo templates with a flawless and clean design will speed up your work.

Guess by now I made it a bit more understandable why Smart Slider 3 Pro is my #1 choice when it comes to sliders. Let’s get more visual.

After installing and activating Smart Slider 3 (same process as with any other WordPress plugin), a new panel will appear in your WordPress dashboard.

Smart Slider 3 in WordPress menu
Smart Slider 3 in WordPress menu

This is where all the magic happens. When you click on Smart Slider in your WordPress menu, you will be redirected to the dashboard.

Smart Slider 3 settings

There are three menu items:

  • Dashboard (which is pretty much a homepage of Smart Slider settings / options)
  • Settings
  • Help (direct access to detailed Smart Slider 3 documentation, customer support and video tutorials)
Smart Slider 3 Dashboard
Smart Slider 3 Dashboard

General settings and framework settings
I suggest you explore them step-by-step. For now, let’s keep the default ones.

Fonts
This tab allows you to select and configure fonts for your slider. Additional options: enable or disable Google fonts, select font style and character set.

Item defaults
The most extensive and well thought-out tab of Smart Slider 3 settings. Select and set up different elements of your slider.

Generator tabs
Currently, there are 6 social networks you can connect to your WordPress website to create dynamic sliders based on your posted content. Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube. One of the coolest features of Smart Slider 3, it’s also very flexible and useful.

Let’s return to Smart Slider 3 dashboard welcome screen. You have probably noticed the Info center at the top-right corner. Using it, you can check for Smart Slider 3 updates and activate / deactivate your license.
Smart Slider info center

Creating a slider with Smart Slider 3 Pro

Smart Slider 3 dashboard presents three options. You can design a new slider from the scratch, explore templates library to import a demo or check a sample slider.

New slider
After clicking on “Create a New Project” box, new window opens. Here you can choose a name for your slider, set up slider’s width and height per your requirements and select slider’s format.
Creating a full width slider

After selecting a preset, click Create. Now you need to choose content / images for your slider. It’s either your own images, Smart Slider 3 library, a video, your WordPress blog posts or other dynamic sources (Dribble, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, RSS, Vimeo, YouTube).

Additional options, if you have any of these plugins installed and activated:

  • All-in-One Event Calendar
  • Gallery by BestWebSoft
  • Events Manager
  • Nextgen Gallery
  • The Events Calendar
  • WooCommerce

As the most common source, let’s start with images. Each slide has its own configuration options that appear when you edit slides separately (click on green square plus icon on the left side to access them). There are also a few features for a more convenient, faster and better workflow:

  • Quick access to general slider settings
  • Quick access to slides
  • 1-click preview of your slider
  • Live slider controls and adjustments for mobile devices

It’s quite easy to get carried away with all design possibilities and advanced options of Smart Slider 3. Don’t forget to save your work from time to time.

Single slide settings
To simplify and streamline your work on each slide, Smart Slider 3 equips you with 5 groups of editing tools.

Layer tab
basic tools, content tools, media tools, advanced tools

Add Panel

Structure tab
basic and special layouts

General slider settings
General slider settings

Conclusion

Yoast once published an article named “Sliders suck and should be banned from your website”. Yes, they are respected and famous SEO experts, but I highly doubt this statement. What is 100% true, is that little fact that

“any animation not triggered by the user, can be at best distracting, at worst annoying” (Jules)

Take it as the main rule when you design a slider. Aside from that, sliders don’t suck. Smart Slider 3 proves it.

The post GeneratePress and Smart Slider 3: The Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Build Your Website Easily with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3 https://smartslider3.com/blog/astra-theme-slider/ Sat, 28 Mar 2020 09:23:07 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=10371 In our busy world we can’t spend lots of time building websites, sometimes we have just a few days. But if you aren’t a developer, can you build a website? Can you make it in such a short time? Can you simply customize and make it responsive? Yes, it is possible! With the Astra Theme […]

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]]>
In our busy world we can’t spend lots of time building websites, sometimes we have just a few days. But if you aren’t a developer, can you build a website? Can you make it in such a short time? Can you simply customize and make it responsive? Yes, it is possible! With the Astra Theme and with a slider you can build a good-looking site just in a few hours. And with a slider you can cheer up your site. Smart Slider 3 is a great possibility to realize this in your Astra Theme.

In this article I will show you how you can build your website with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3.

About Astra

Astra is a very simple and customizable theme in which you can customize your own content. This theme has simple editing options. The Theme is available for free at WordPress.org and it has wide-ranging popularity. It has 1+ million active installs and 5/5 stars rating.

So you can trust it!

Astra Theme for WordPress
Astra Theme for WordPress

Astra is made for page builders, therefore you can customize it without a coding knowledge. You can change the design in the WordPress Customizer. Besides that it offers you ready to import websites. You should just install the Starter Templates plugin to get the beautiful layouts.

Using the Astra Theme is very extensive. You can use it for your blog or you can make an eCommerce, a small agency or a business website. You can change everything in the Theme, and can reach the result what you imagined.

It is important mention that Astra is made for speed. And this isn’t just a “marketing trick”, this is a real fact what the Theme promises. But I will write about that later.

Has the Astra Theme slider tool? Unfortunately not, and I miss it. Slider makes your site more expressive, but you can use the Smart Slider 3 plugin, and you can easily put it into your theme. So if you want to build a website using free tools, Smart Slider 3 with Astra Theme provides you a great option.

How about page builders?

Page builders are very populated in WordPress. You should just imagine what you want, and with simple drag and drop your website is ready. But a page builder can’t work well without a good theme. A theme should be optimized to be highly compatible for page builders.

Astra offers different solutions with which you can be sure that your website will look exactly how you imagined it. It gives you more space to focus on design. At the post and pages you can disable the header, title or the footer. You can switch a layout inside a post/page, and you can choose a sidebar option as well.

Astra Settings
Astra Settings

So Astra lets you customize every setting on every page, so you can simply personalize your website. You can focus on the content. There aren’t places what you can’t change with a page builder, if there is something, you can easily switch that off.

How about sliders?

Nowadays I can’t imagine a website without a hero image, and a slider is an extended version of that. In a slider there are multiple versions of your hero images which you can make your site even more professional with.

Sample Slider in Smart Slider 3
Sample Slider in Smart Slider 3

Sliders are particularly good design tools which allow images, videos and other content like CTA buttons. The content can be expressive and maximizes the space on your website as well.

When a person visits your website, it makes a good impression on them if your site:

  • is easy to read,
  • simple,
  • clear,
  • and good-designed.

And sliders can add these conditions for your website.

The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
Get Started
Smart Slider 3 - The new way to build a Slider

Tutorial: Astra Theme with Smart Slider 3 – Website in 1 Hour

Import a template from Starter Templates

In Astra there are a lot of free and premium ready to import websites. You should download just the Starter Templates plugin and you can choose which page builder you are using: Elementor, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg or Brizy.

Select your page builder in Starter Templates
Select your page builder in Starter Templates

Using these templates is a good choice, they look gorgeous, modern and can be imported easily. Some of the templates are only available in paid version, but there are a lot for free ones.
You can preview them and by 2 clicking you can import what you want.

First you should install the plugins which are in your chosen template. Finally you can import the site.

Import a template
Import a template

Import a slider from the Template Library

You have a ready template now and you need just a slider to the top. You can use slider easily in Astra Theme, and if you want to be ready fast, Smart Slider 3 has a Template Library as well. And you can import a slider from there.

Import a template in Smart Slider
Import a template in Smart Slider

In the Slider Library there are a lot of premium and free sliders, now I will import a free one.

Free slider templates
Free slider templates

After that you can customize your slider and you can put it into your Astra Theme. Adding to Astra Theme slider is very simple with your favorite page builder. You should just use the Smart Slider 3 widget, and you have a slider in your site now!

If you would like to learn about how you can publish Smart Slider 3, watch our video:

It took about 5 minutes to have a ready template on your site considering that you have looked around on the Astra Site and knew which Astra template you would use. Importing a slider and putting it in your template is not more than 5 minutes. So you have 50 Minutes yet if you would like to finish your page in one hour.

Now you should just personalize your content. Very fast, very simple and you can enjoy building a website.

Creating in Astra Theme slider for the heading part

With Astra Theme you can even make a custom header with Smart Slider 3. This is also simple, you can choose a widget type for header in the Customizing → Header → Primary menu.

Customizing menu in Astra Theme
Customizing menu in Astra Theme

Then in your Customizing menu → Widgets you can set the Smart Slider 3 widget.

Smart Slider 3 widget
Smart Slider 3 widget

You should just choose which slider would you like to display. And now you have a header on all of your pages with your slider.

But there are more options to apply your Astra Theme slider, first of all you can download the Astra Hooks plugin. With this plugin you can paste a shortcode fast everywhere on your page.

Astra Hooks
Astra Hooks

You should just copy and paste your sliders’ shortcode into a place where you want to display it.

Customize hooks
Customize hooks

So I can tell you there are a lot of options to make your own website.

I wrote about only the free version of Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3. With the paid version of them I can’t imagine limits by building a site.

How about speed?

The speed of your webpage is the most important thing what you have to consider. People don’t have lots of time to wait loading your site, so it should be fast. It depends on a lot of factors, but choosing a good Theme and a fast hosting can be the solution.

Astra loads only about 0.5 second. That is usually short, because most homepages load about 1MB. It is optimized for speed, and needs only 50 KB of resources to load. It doesn’t use jQuery, instead of that it uses Vanilla. And Astra Theme gets high ratings in all page speed test tools.

About Astra speed
About Astra speed

Smart Slider 3 only loads after everything else has finished loading on your website to be able to calculate the positions where everything should be. Normally it doesn’t take lots of time, but if you uploaded a high quality picture it can be slower. So most of the speed depends on the used rich media. But in Smart Slider 3 you have the opportunity to optimize your slider.

Smart Slider 3 offers a lot of speed settings for you in the Pro version.

What can you do to optimize your slider?

  • Choose the correct image size: Use images where the dimensions are close to your slider size!
  • Use device specific images: You can use device specific images what can be easily set, also you can optimize your images even better.
  • Reduce the number of slides: Don’t use too many slides on your page! Furthermore you can display your images randomly. This is also an option in Smart Slider 3.
  • Use the Smart Slider 3 image resizing feature: The Optimize tab → Layer image resize and Background image resize options can be really useful. They will resize the images to the sliders size automatically.
  • Use the lazy loading: With this feature you can set up that a certain number of images load.
Smart Slider 3 Optimize tab
Smart Slider 3 Optimize tab

So Smart Slider 3 in Astra Theme takes care of your problems with the speed.

Final Thoughts

I can recommend Astra Theme to everybody who starts building a website now and doesn’t know which Theme to choose. It loads fast, it is clean and you can fully customize it. And it works fine with Smart Slider 3, hence you can take your site more professional.

Astra is a great decision if you like to use page builders, and Smart Slider 3 is the best choice to use a slider in your Astra Theme. With this Theme and with this plugin you can save a lot of time.

The post Build Your Website Easily with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> How to Add a Slider in OceanWP Theme https://smartslider3.com/blog/oceanwp-slider/ Fri, 27 Mar 2020 07:00:11 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=8230 A good theme is the basis of your site. If you would like to make a good impression on your visitors, you should choose a great theme. If you like using page builders, your decision will often come to OceanWP. OceanWP is a free WordPress theme that has a lot of premium features. It has […]

The post How to Add a Slider in OceanWP Theme appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]>
A good theme is the basis of your site. If you would like to make a good impression on your visitors, you should choose a great theme. If you like using page builders, your decision will often come to OceanWP. OceanWP is a free WordPress theme that has a lot of premium features. It has more than 600,000 active installs and a five-star rating with many great reviews. Also, a slider is almost a default feature on websites. To use OceanWP slider, Smart Slider 3 can be a good choice for creating powerful, clean and beautiful site.

Why is OceanWP a good choice?

OceanWP is fully responsive and e-commerce ready, furthermore it integrates very well with WooCommerce. It’s designed to work with the best page builders, therefore works well with Elementor, Visual Composer, Divi, and Beaver Builder too.

OceanWP Demo
Imported Demo from OceanWP Demo Library

It is always great when the theme customization options are integrated into the default WordPress editor. Here you can see a live preview of the changes you applied. In the customize menu you can set up different theme elements such as the header, footer, menu and sidebar. First of all, I can tell you that the OceanWP customize menu is very well collected, containing many settings. The WordPress customizer is where OceanWP really shines. With the extensions you get more and more options which you can customize your site.

Ocean Extra: recommended basis plugin

Ocean Extra is a recommended plugin for the settings. If you navigate to the Theme Panel, you have the option to enable/disable the customizer panels. You can upload your logo, favicon, similarly choose your primary color and typography. In the Theme Panel “My library” is available, where you can create your own template like custom header or footer.

OceanWP Settings
OceanWP Settings view under the post

With this plugin you get a detailed meta box under the posts or pages with the name Ocean WP Settings. There are a lot of options by which you can customize a post or page. I think this is one of the best features in the OceanWP with lots of options. You can add shortcode to many places, hide sidebar, change menu color or set a new header.

OceanWP Extensions: from OceanWP slider to the sticky header

OceanWP can be extended with free and even more premium plugins. You can buy separate extensions, or likewise a core bundle of extensions all at once. OceanWP has premium extensions like the Sticky Header or Footer which is the basis of many sites. One of my favourite ones is Elementor Widgets, it makes building your website easier with Elementor page builder. Navigation Widget, Ajax Search, Logged In/Out widget can be useful on your site as well.

However, there are a lot of free plugins you can download to the theme. What I suggest is the OceanWP Extra, as I have written above. The theme offers lots of demos that you can use and customize on your site with the Demo Import extension. It is probably the easiest way to make a site quickly. OceanWP slider plugin is a Posts Slider, which means that you can make OceanWP slider with 1 or 3 posts or products.

OceanWP slider
OceanWP Posts Slider

The plugin generates a shortcode, what you can use. I think it’s a basic extension but it is simple and can be easily set up. If you would like to use on OceanWP slider with even more functions, I recommend you Smart Slider 3.

Smart Slider 3 as OceanWP slider

Smart Slider 3 can be certainly a great alternative to OceanWP slider plugin. It can be easy to use as the default OceanWP slider. It helps you create beautiful and complex sliders, and you can customize everything. The best part is that Smart Slider 3 is free, just like OceanWP. Also, it’s available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. The plugin is, first of all, fully responsive, clean and powerful, furthermore user friendly. Using Smart Slider 3 is easy to learn, which also helps a lot documentations and videos.

Smart Slider 3 can be a great free alternative to many premium sliders, but it is more than average image sliders. It has layers, beautiful effects and dynamic slide generators. You can autoplay between the slides and set up the time to change it. In this plugin you can also make a video slider with YouTube or Vimeo which makes your site morFe professional. Also, the plugin has more wonderful features in PRO version.

The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
Get Started
Smart Slider 3 - The new way to build a Slider

How to create responsive OceanWP slider free with Smart Slider 3

After installing Smart Slider 3, you can load an example from our demo page or begin to make a new slider. Smart Slider 3 has different layers which have their own settings and you can customize them. For example, you can change the font color and family of the heading and text layers or set background color. You can choose slide background image fill, and also you can add a background animation. After you have finished your slider, you can publish it.

Insert to the OceanWP slider with Smart Slider 3 is very easy with shortcode:

OceanWP slider inserting
OceanWP slider inserting

OceanWP has more opportunity to insert a shortcode. You can just easily copy and paste the slider shortcode into a post or page. Also in OceanWP Settings you can customize the position: before/after the top bar, header, title or footer. Or customize it with Elementor.

How to make a custom header with Smart Slider 3?

In OceanWP you have the chance to make a custom header or footer. This is like a template, and Smart Slider 3 is a good opportunity to use it as a custom header. The easiest way of making a custom header, when you use a page builder like Elementor.

  • STEP 1: Navigate to the Theme PanelMy library, than Add New. If you use Elementor, choose Elementor Canvas template in Post Attributes, after that you can customize it.
  • STEP 2: When you are ready, go to the Customize menu → HeaderGeneral, and set your Custom Header. That’s all!

Reasons to use Smart Slider 3 in your OceanWP theme

  • Free: Smart Slider 3 is the most powerful free slider plugin in the plugin directory.
  • Responsive: You can customize the slider easily for any mobile devices.
  • User friendly: Drag & drop slide editor with intuitive tools.
  • Easy to insert: using shortcodes
  • Different layers: heading, text, button, image, YouTube, and Vimeo
  • Customizable: Every inch of the layers and the slides, such as color, font or size etc.
  • Design: It makes your site more professional

Dynamic Slider to your blog

Like the OceanWP slider plugin, the Smart Slider 3 also can create sliders from your posts. You should just once set it up, after that the slider will automatically refresh the content. That’s also easy to do, just choose to give dynamic slides to your slider and one of the WordPress generators. After that, a lot of settings appear, by which you can customize your dynamic slider.

I’ve made an example for you, where I’ve set 3 sliders. I used a free demo slider for the base. Than I gave the title and the date and the first 300 words of my posts as description. The dynamic post slider uses the post’s featured image as the slide background.
Dynamic Slider

WooCommerce slider to your webshop

OceanWP is e-commerce ready, you can build easily an awesome webshops with WooCommerce. In the PRO version of Smart Slider 3 you can build your website to be more efficient and spectacular. You have the possibility of making a dynamic WooCommerce slider with a lot of settings.

WooCommerce Slider

With this dynamic slide generator, you can show the contents of your products. You can set up how your slides will look with the data of the first slide. You can put down layers, and use the variables to put those data inside them what you want there to be. In our documentation you can find more information about filters and variables.

Conclusion

I really liked this theme, I found a solution or setting for everything what I needed. OceanWP works very well with the page builders and it’s easy to use and learn. If you would like to build a professional website free, you should try OceanWP with Smart Slider 3.

The post How to Add a Slider in OceanWP Theme appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> How to Add WordPress Sliders to Twenty Nineteen https://smartslider3.com/blog/wordpress-twenty-nineteen-slider/ Wed, 19 Jun 2019 06:10:04 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=19933 Twenty Nineteen is the new default theme for WordPress and has been designed to show off the power of the new block editor. What’s more, it’s super easy to customize if you’re looking to add sliders to your site! Twenty Nineteen features custom styles for all the default blocks and works great with custom blocks […]

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Twenty Nineteen is the new default theme for WordPress and has been designed to show off the power of the new block editor. What’s more, it’s super easy to customize if you’re looking to add sliders to your site!

Twenty Nineteen features custom styles for all the default blocks and works great with custom blocks provided by third party plugin developers. It’s also been built so what you see in the new editor looks like what you’ll see on the front-end of your site.

It’s a minimal starter theme that has an elegant aesthetic designed to be adaptable to a wide range of sites. Use it for your typography-driven blog or adapt it for your professional business website. It’s also suitable for magazine, portfolio and non-profit sites.

Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme preview
Twenty Nineteen WordPress theme preview

Twenty Nineteen was originally released with WordPress 5.0 and it is proving popular, with over 1 million active installations to date. I personally like the new theme design and have enjoyed tinkering with it in the new block editor (formerly the Gutenberg editor). It’s easy to customize with blocks, and it feels relatively light compared to other free WordPress themes.

Let’s take a look at Twenty Nineteen’s design features, and then we’ll show you how to easily add a slider to this fantastic free theme.

Twenty Nine Features At a Glance

With its pared-down, open aesthetic, Twenty Nineteen provides a great foundation for a wide variety of websites. Plus, with the WordPress Customizer, you can easily access theme options for your site.

Its features include:

Customizable With the New Editor

Twenty Nineteen is completely customizable with the new WordPress editor. You can choose any of the available blocks to create any kind of content for your site, from columns of text to full-width sliders. You can also use blocks provided by third-party plugins.

Unlike Twenty Seventeen, which has a fullscreen homepage design, Twenty Nineteen has a more contemporary full-width, single column design that looks great on all devices. There’s ample whitespace, giving the theme a professional look and feel. The sans serif headline paired with serif body text makes for a classic typographical combination.

Gutenberg block editor in Twenty Nineteen theme
Gutenberg block editor in Twenty Nineteen theme

Supports Site Logos

Twenty Nineteen supports site logos in the header. Whether you have a personal blog, portfolio, or business site, you can easily add a logo or photo to your site, which will appear in the top-left corner together with your navigation menu.

To add a logo, open the WordPress Customizer and go to “Site Identity.”

Changing your site logo in Twenty Nineteen theme's customizer
Changing your site logo is easy in Twenty Nineteen theme’s customizer

The new default theme also includes a social icons menu, which lets you add links to your social media provides in the header, too.

Supports Bold Features Images

With Twenty Nineteen, you can display featured images full-width or fullscreen (the images cover the full width and height of the screen).

Color overlays are a new feature in this default WordPress theme, which you can easily switch on and off. Twenty Nineteen uses a blue accent color by default, but you can change the primary color in the WordPress Customizer. This gives you loads of control over custom colors that make you look like a pro.

Accent color picker in Twenty Nineteen's Customizer
Accent color picker in Twenty Nineteen’s Customizer

Widgetized Footer

There’s a widget area in the footer, which includes all the widgets you would normally see in a sidebar, i.e. search, archives, categories, meta, recent comments.

On screens wider than 1169px, widgets are automatically displayed in a two column layout.

Why Use Smart Slider 3 for Your Twenty Nineteen Sliders?

Smart Slider 3 is a robust, feature-rich and user-friendly slider plugin for WordPress that comes with a custom block for the new WordPress editor. That means it’s easier than ever to add a slider to your WordPress website!

The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
Get Started
Smart Slider 3 - The new way to build a Slider

The free version of Smart Slider 3 offers just the right number of customization options to help you create a beautiful slider, all without feeling overwhelmed by features. Unlike other free slider plugins, it also lets you work with layers — an essential feature of any slider plugin, in my opinion.

Here are some of the things that I like about Smart Slider 3 over other plugins:

  • Content editor – Edit your slides like you would with a page builder.
  • Canvas editor – Drag and drop your layers anywhere on your slides.
  • Slide library – The Slide Library provides several pre-made slides to kickstart your work.
  • Page builder supportElementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Visual Composer, and the new WordPress block editor.
  • Responsive and touch-friendly – Your sliders will look great on all devices.
  • Dynamic slides – Automatically display your WordPress posts in slides.
  • Customizable controls – Arrows, bullets, autoplay, bar, thumbnails, shadows.
  • Slide backgrounds – 9 background animations.
  • Layers – Build unique designs with 6 layers: Image, heading, text, button, Vimeo, YouTube.
  • Font and style manager – Easily update typography, font sizes, and styles.
  • Sample sliders – With 11 sliders to start.

Smart Slider 3 makes it really easy to add sliders to Twenty Nineteen. Whether you want to add a slider to the header of your site, a fullscreen slider background, or a simple image slider, Smart Slider 3 makes it really to add new sliders to your WordPress site.

How to Add a Slider to the Twenty Nineteen Theme

Twenty Nineteen theme is the perfect theme for any modern blog. Your visitors can focus on the content of your post, without any distractions. But you don’t need to have fancy effects to make your website interesting and interactive. Instead of distracting your visitors, you can create a simple slider which strengthens your message.

What’s a Simple Slider?

A simple slider is a kind of slider, that’s not bloated with fancy effects. Generally, it has images and a few lines of text, which either describe the image or tell a different story. They can browse them in an easy and convenient way.

Smart Slider 3 Free is the perfect choice to create a simple slider to enrich your blog posts. As a matter of fact, you can customize every aspect of your slider. Not only you can create an unlimited number of sliders, but they’ll be truly unique. What’s more, all sliders you create are fully responsive. Gutenberg makes it super easy to add your slider to any page or post of your website.

How to Create a Simple Slider for your website?

It’s incredibly easy to create a simple slider with Smart Slider 3. First, add images, then put down some layers and style them. Finally, add arrows or bullets and the perfect simple slider is ready. To demonstrate how easy it is to create a simple slider, we recorded a video for you. It shows you how to create a beautiful simple slider and add it to a post using Gutenberg editor.

With Smart Slider 3 you’re not restricted to create static slides only. You can create beautiful dynamic post sliders as well. A dynamic post slider shows your latest blog posts automatically. In other words, you don’t have to update the slider after you add a new post. Moreover, a simple blog slider on your homepage can attract more people to your latest posts.

How to publish a slider to your Twenty Nineteen slider’s homepage?

Twenty Nineteen theme has one widget position only, at the footer of the page. This position is perfect to create copyright text or footer menu. On the negative side, the footer widget position makes it harder to create header sliders. But worry not, because you don’t have to give up on having a homepage slider. You can always edit your theme’s files and place your slider there.

Publishing a Smart Slider 3 slider to your theme’s file

In this tutorial below, we’re going to place a slider just below the main menu. We’re going to directly edit the theme’s files, so be sure to use FTP and don’t edit your theme from Appearace > Theme Editor.

When you update your theme, all modifications will be lost. If you want to avoid that, create a child theme for your changes. Then only edit the child then, which makes your edits update-safe.

Twenty Nineteen slider custom postion
The place between the menu and content where we’re going to place our Smart Slider 3 Slider
  1. Let’s open up the theme’s header.php file located at /wp-content/themes/twentynineteen.
  2. Find the following code: </header><!-- #masthead -->
  3. Go to the Smart Slider 3 slider you want to publish and copy its PHP code. It will be something like echo do_shortcode('[smartslider3 slider=1]');
  4. Write the following code to your theme’s file, just below </header><!-- #masthead -->
    <?php
        if(is_home() || is_front_page()){
    
        }
    ?>

    This code makes sure your slider will only show up in your home page. If you want to have the slider on all pages, skip this step.

  5. Put the PHP code you copied in step 3 to the 3rd line of the code, like this:
  6. <?php
        if(is_home() || is_front_page()){
            echo do_shortcode('[smartslider3 slider=1]');
        }
    ?>

    This is how the final result should look like:
    Twenty Nineteen slider publishing via Smart Slider 3

  7. Save the file and upload it back your site.

That’s it, the slider will show up in your home page now.

Twenty Nineteen slider on the homepage using Smart Slider 3
Twenty Nineteen slider on the homepage using Smart Slider 3

Ready to Get Started?

Overall, Twenty Nineteen is a great new addition to the collection of WordPress default themes. It has a clean, elegant design that’s easy to customize and adapt for any kind of site.

Want to add a slider to Twenty Nineteen? With Smart Slider 3, you can easily add sliders to the new theme using the new block editor. Try Smart Slider 3 for free today!

Have you used Twenty Nineteen? What customizations have you made? Let us know in the comments below!

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