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

What is a WordPress Slideshow?

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

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

How to create a WordPress slideshow?

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

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

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

Why Use WordPress Slideshows?

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

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

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

1. Highlighting New Content

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

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

2. Photo Galleries

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

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

3. Online portfolios

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

4. Ecommerce

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

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

5. Testimonials

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

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

How to Add WordPress Slideshows to Your Website

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

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

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

What is a WooCommerce slider?

A WooCommerce slider is a kind of slider that displays your WooCommerce products. For example, a WooCommerce slider can display the latest products. But you can create a WooCommerce slider that displays your most popular products as well. If you run a sale, it’s a good idea to create a nice slider which displays the products that are on sale.

7 WooCommerce Product sliders for inspiration

Before you create a new WooCommerce slider, it’s always good to look for stunning examples. A good example can not only provide inspiration but a visual guide as well. In this article I’ve collected 7 gorgeous WooCommerce slider examples for you.

We have created these marvelous carousels in Smart Slider Pro. It’s worth noting that you don’t need to create them from scratch. In fact, you can import any of these sliders into your Smart Slider Pro by one click. Additionally, it’s simple to create a dynamic product slider using these templates.

1. Product Carousel

View Demo

The Product Carousel is what a traditional WooCommerce slider looks like. It displays more slides next to one another, focusing on the product’s picture. It also displays details, namely the name, category and price. This layout makes it easy for customers to compare the products, as they can see them together. Also, it displays a sale badge on the products that are on sale.

If you want to create a WooCommerce slider your customers are familiar with, look no further. This traditional looking product carousel will get you covered, and your customers will like it a lot.

2. Top 5 Products

View Demo

The Top 5 Products slider displays one product at a time. Moreover, the product slide covers the whole screen on all devices. In other words, it’s not a traditional looking WooCommerce carousel. But that’s just one of the advantages of this slider, because it makes your site stand out from the crowd. Additionally, the large product image makes it look unique and stunning. Since it displays one product at a time, there is plenty of space to show every important detail.

3. Full Width Product Carousel

View Demo

The Full Width Product carousel is another traditional looking WooCommerce slider. Howerver, it has a cool twist: it doesn’t only display products, but special slides as well. These slides don’t display a product. Instead, they display small details that make the shop more attractive. For example, on this template there’s a slide that informs the visitor about on-sale products. Another slide displays a testimonial from one of the customers. Also, there’s a slide that promotes the newsletter of the shop.

These creative ideas make the slider stand out and more memorable for the visitor. Additionally, they help encourage the visitors to shop. Who doesn’t want their slider to give them more sales?

4. Full Width Product Slider

View Demo

This is another slider which displays one product at a time. This time the images are not full page, only full width, but still large enough to make visitors love them. The slider displays the WooCommerce product detail in a card. This card shows a small stock image of the product, its price and name. Additionally, there’s enough room for a short description and a buy now button.

5. Product Showcase

View Demo

People are familiar with traditional WooCommerce carousels. They like them, because these sliders display more products next to each other. The Product Showcase slider works the same way, so customers will love it. However, there’s a huge advantage of using such a showcase slider instead of a carousel. The showcase keeps the focus on the slide in the middle. As a result, customers will know exactly which product details to check out first. Additionally, they can see there are more slides to check.

6. Boxed Product Slider

View Demo

Did you like the previous ideas to create a WooCommerce slider that focuses on one product only? The Boxed Product slider demonstrates another way to create such sliders. What makes it stand out is that the image and details of the product are separated. As a result, the customers can enjoy the full image, without any text covering it. Additionally, this two-column layout gives plenty of space to describe the product. Both the title, category, price and buy now button can fit and there’s enough room for a longer description as well.

7. Product Slider

View Demo

What makes the Product Slider look special is it’s minimalist approach. The base of the slider is a huge image of the product which is an instant eye-catcher. Such a large slider would have plenty of space to describe the product. However, this slider only shows the most basic details: name, category, price and a button to buy. As a result, they cover only a small part of the image, which allows customers to inspect every detail.

Conclusion

Sliders are versatile design tools, and they make it easy to showcase your products in a creative way. As you can see in the examples above, there are many ways to create a WooCommerce slider. You can create a traditional slider, which visitors know well. As a result, they’ll instantly know how to check out your highlighted products. As a matter of fact, you can’t go wrong with a traditional product slider.

Of course, you don’t need to follow the flow. In fact, it’s worth getting creative and standing out of the crowd. In other words, feel free to be creative and make something unique for your customers to explore. What kind of WooCommerce slider will you create next?

The post 7 Woocommerce Slider Examples You Need To See appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To help you narrow down your search, I’ve handpicked this collection of the best premium plugins for WordPress, based on the many years I’ve been working with WordPress. These are plugins I see time and time again in the backends of WordPress — these are premium WordPress plugins people use and get value from.

Want to jump to a section quickly?

🏗️ Visual Builder Plugins
🔒 Security Plugins
⚡ Optimization Plugins
🔍 SEO Plugins
🛒 Ecommerce Plugins
📝 Forms and Booking Plugins

Best Visual Builder Premium WordPress Plugins

Page builders and visual builders have become an important design tool for WordPress users. Building sites is no longer just for developers — with visual builder plugins, now anyone can create a beautiful WordPress site.

1. Elementor Pro

It’s easy to see why it’s so popular. With Elementor you can build complex, pixel perfect page designs using drag and drop. Want to start designing from scratch? Choose from over 80 design elements and add text, buttons and even forms to your pages. Need a template? There are 100+ pre-designed templates to help get you started.

2. Smart Slider 3

Don’t be confused by the name — this plugin is truly heavy duty, allowing you to create everything from homepage sliders and WordPress carousels to fullscreen video sliders and image sliders.

With the user-friendly canvas and content modes, layers, and huge range of elements and templates, Smart Slider 3 blows every other slider plugin out of the water with the level of functionality it provides compared to other premium WordPress plugins.

3. Divi

The Divi offers user-friendly visual page building that’s really fast. There are 46 modules for everything from text and email optins to filterable portfolios and galleries. A unique feature of Divi is its integrated a/b split testing and conversions rate optimization system, which lets you test different design — no other page builder offers this.

4. JetElements

• post carousel and slider, advanced carousel, and animated box;
• recent, featured, sale, best-selling, and top products;
• image grid, justify, and masonry;
• services and testimonials;
• portfolio, audio players, Parallax effect, and many other amazing tools.

5. Ultimate Blocks

No matter what type of website you maintain, whether a blog, news portal, eCommerce, or else, Ultimate Blocks can help present your content beautifully on posts and pages. Some of the most used blocks of the plugin are Testimonials, Call to Action, Content Toggle, Button, Rating, and Review.

In addition, some of its other exciting blocks are Tabbed Content, Image Slider, Content Filter, Styled Box, and Icon. Based on respective blocks, Ultimate Blocks lets you customize their color, font, size, value, and heading.

Best Security Premium WordPress Plugins

It’s easy to take on an it-won’t-happen-to-me approach when it comes to website security, but chances are, if your website hasn’t already been compromised, it will be hacked sooner or later. That’s why you need security and backup plugins for your site.

6. Sucuri

Premium users get access to an enterprise grade Website Firewall designed to give you the best security protection any website can hope for. It protects your website from a variety of website attacks, including DDoS attacks, exploitation of vulnerabilities, Zero Day disclosure patches, and brute force attacks.

7. Defender

• Security scans
• Vulnerability reports
• Audit logs
• Two-factor authentication
• Safety recommendations
• Blacklist monitoring
• Brute force lockout
• IP lockout device
• Simple security tweaks
• Code checker (for core, plugins and themes)
• Login masking
• File change detection
• Automated backups (via Snapshot)

On top of all that, Defender has one of the most user-friendly UI’s of any premium WordPress plugins for security I’ve used. Tweaking security settings can be a headache, but Defender makes it easy (and strangely, kind of fun!).

8. VaultPress

Best Performance Optimization Premium WordPress Plugins

You’ve got 15 minutes of free time to speed up your site. What do you do? For time-poor site admins who want only the best performance optimization plugins, WP Rocket and Smush are must-have premium WordPress plugins.

9. WP Rocket

In addition to browser caching, WP Rocket also provides:

• Minification and GZIP compression for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
• Database cleaning
• Lazy loading
• Cache preloading
• DNS prefetching
• File deferring
• Google Fonts optimization

10. WP Smush Pro

A useful feature of WP Smush is the ability to bulk smush images automatically when you upload them to your site so you don’t have to do it manually. It also offers WebP conversion.

11. Optimole

• Optimole optimizes your images automatically
• Picks the right image size for the visitor’s browser and viewport
• Serves images via a fast image CDN​
• Uses lazy loading to display your images

Optimole has full compatibility with popular page builders and you can easily integrate it in your WordPress site. It can be installed in a few clicks and then left in the back-end to do its job.

Best SEO Premium WordPress Plugins

Need some help with your search engine optimization? There’s one premium SEO plugin for WordPress that beats all others…

12. Yoast SEO

The premium version of Yoast SEO includes:

• Advanced XML sitemaps
• Full control over site breadcrumbs
• Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
• Title and meta description templating
• Content and SEO analysis, including readability
• Text insights
• Automatic internal linking suggestions

Best Ecommerce Premium WordPress Plugins

WordPress isn’t just the most popular content management system — it’s also the world’s most popular ecommerce platform when you pair it with WooCommerce.

13. WooCommerce

Beyond the core WooCommerce plugin, the WooCommerce Extensions store provides access to hundreds of free and premium extensions, allowing you to add all sorts of additional functionality to your store.

14. WooCommerce Subscriptions

You can customize Subscriptions to include payment models for both physical and digital goods, but also any services you provide. Create time-based subscription packages that can entice new customers based on package value, e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, and quarterly payments.

15. PH WooCommerce Deposits

• Enhanced Experience: Simplify deposits, secure items now, pay later at checkout.
• Flexible Deposits: Control amounts – fixed or percentage-based, aligning with preferences.
• Automated Invoices: Streamline with auto balance invoices, scheduled customer alerts.
• Seamless Integration: Smooth deposit process, personalized buttons for ease.
• Tailored Schedules: Daily, weekly, monthly payments – flexible choices.
• Product-Centric Control: Customize per-product deposit options, shape your store.

Best Forms and Booking Premium WordPress Plugins

No matter what kind of site you have, you’ll want to keep in touch with people who visit — and for that you’ll need a contact form. With the options below, you’ll have access to advanced features and functionality.

16. Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is available for free, but you can do a lot more by upgrading to the premium version of the plugin. You have control of every elements, and you can easily put it on your WordPress site with widget or shortcode. Whether you choose the free version or decide to upgrade, you’ll have a solid and reliable form that’s easy to use.

17. JetFormBuilder

JetFormBuilder allows integration with leading email marketing and CRM platforms for efficient data collection and enhanced lead generation. MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and PayPal integrations are available in the free version. Additionally, you can choose ready-made form patterns to start creating the form from the template.

18. Amelia

With Amelia you can receive a booking engine with lots of features, it’s easy to use, you can install it with a few clicks. You can customize it to fit your needs on your website, and it has a tons of demos what you can use.

19. LatePoint

With its user-friendly interface, LatePoint ensures a seamless experience for both administrators and clients. Optimized for speed and responsiveness across all devices, it supports popular payment methods and integrates smoothly with external services.

Whether you’re a fitness coach, beauty salon owner, or consultant, LatePoint adapts to your specific scheduling needs, enhancing user experience and making appointment management effortless and efficient.

20. SureMembers

This plugin streamlines the process of establishing membership tiers, integrating payment gateways, and customizing access rules. Setting up access groups, defining content permissions, and choosing between free or paid memberships is straightforward and hassle-free.

With features like drip content, paywalls, and user role customization, SureMembers provides granular control over content access, allowing for the precise management of posts and resources.

Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or managing multiple sites, SureMembers offers a comprehensive and flexible solution for building and running successful membership websites.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, the 20 best premium WordPress plugins. Do you use any of these plugins? Or do you have any favorites that didn’t make the list? Let us know!

The post 20 Premium WordPress Plugins to Look Out For in 2024 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.