Customizing a Pre-Built WordPress Slideshow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready to Create Your Own Stunning WordPress Slideshow?

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

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

https://smartslider3.com/blog/lightbox-slider/ Sat, 25 Apr 2020 10:42:58 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=15017 Lightbox slider was made to display images and videos by filling the whole screen with one click. When you create a website it can be a real challenge to show many images to your visitors without breaking the layout. When the image is inserted in the content area that will most likely limit its width. […]

The post Add Lightbox Slider to your WordPress site appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Lightbox slider was made to display images and videos by filling the whole screen with one click. When you create a website it can be a real challenge to show many images to your visitors without breaking the layout. When the image is inserted in the content area that will most likely limit its width. That makes it a bit harder to show a large image to the visitors.

But if you use lightbox, you can display your image without crop and you can even show a lightbox gallery from your images. This solution allows you to break boundaries of the image container.

About lightbox

Lightbox appeared in the early 2000’s. It introduced an elegant, easy to implement way to resolve the challenge of showing multiple, large images to the visitors. They can click and when the larger image shows up, they can view multiple images not just that one which they have selected.

Lightbox slider was made to display images by filling the screen, and dimming the rest of the web page. The images in a lightbox is placed above the current page, not within, so you don’t have to worry about ruining your page’s layout to show a large image.

They are widely used to display images, videos and any URL in a fancy area over your website’s main content. Lightbox sliders are popular today because they keep users on the same page. So after checking out the image, the user can easily go back to the original page, without having to wait for the other page to load and the current one to load again.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

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

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

How to create a lightbox slider?

In the Pro version of Smart Slider 3 the lightbox feature can be used easily. All you need to do is to click on a green link button of your slide or layer. After that you can select the lightbox and choose images from your media library, videos or websites, what you would like to display in the lightbox.

If you have a background image on all of your slides, you can use the Backgrounds in Lightbox feature. This option will automatically create a lightbox from all the background images of your slider without you having to add them manually to each of your slides. And when navigating using the lightbox arrows, the slides will be changed, too.

If you don’t want all of your slides to open a lightbox, you can create lightbox from individual slides, too. In this case, you aren’t limited to show one image only. You can select multiple ones, you can even insert videos and iframe URLs. You can even set a slider autoplay interval, to show every image to the visitors without them having to interact with the lightbox.

There aren’t customization options for the lightbox! If you want more specific behaviour or display, use a lightbox plugin or extension, or you need to code!

Open lightbox by clicking on a layer

Using the link option at any layer you can trigger a lightbox from that layer. This way you can showcase more and bigger images, load a video, or show for example a contact form when your users click on an image or a button layer. This lightbox also can have multiple images, videos and frames, so you’ll be able to show whatever you would like to.

So basically you can put a lightbox on every layer, on a button, icon or image, it works like a link. It can be useful when you want to show more images by clicking one like a photo gallery, or you would like to open a video in a lightbox.

Image slider with lightbox

You don’t always have enough space on your site to create a large slider. Because of that you can’t show every image in it’s full size. But the lightbox gives you an opportunity to show your image in a bigger size by clicking on the layer or background. You are able to select many images and even switch them without user action.

If you create an image slider, it can be a useful option to use lightbox on the images. The visitor can see the images in the lightbox too. And if you have image galleries, the visitor can navigate between the images inside the lightbox.

Video lightbox slider

Opening a video in a lightbox is a popular use case in the web. It allows the visitor to enjoy the video without any distraction. You can make an interaction with your visitor using a button with a play icon or just a simple image or text, by which the user can start the video.

Using a lightbox is also great for the loading time, as the videos don’t show up until the lightbox is launched. Our lightbox supports both YouTube, Vimeo and MP4 videos.

A lot of mobile phones have limitations about showing iframe content. Some of them won’t show them at all, so the video wouldn’t show up inside the lightbox and you would see just an empty lightbox. To avoid such problems Smart Slider 3 automatically opens lightboxed Youtube videos inside the Youtube app, not inside the lightbox on phones.

Final Thoughts

By using a lightbox you can not only cheer up your slider but you can also save space on your webpage. I can suggest using this feature if you would like to show your images or videos in a bigger size and you want the visitors to stay on the actual site.

The post Add Lightbox Slider to your WordPress site appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]>

https://smartslider3.com/blog/thumbnail-slider/ Fri, 24 Apr 2020 12:13:29 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=15054 Smart Slider 3 has many features to create a nice free thumbnail slider. You can adjust the thumbnail position, change the colors, show captions and many more. Sliders are the most popular graphic elements on a website. People use them to show their image, media or textual content in a clean and modern way. Since […]

The post Create A Responsive Thumbnail Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Smart Slider 3 has many features to create a nice free thumbnail slider. You can adjust the thumbnail position, change the colors, show captions and many more. Sliders are the most popular graphic elements on a website. People use them to show their image, media or textual content in a clean and modern way.

Since sliders are, in most cases, in a featured place, it’s important to let the visitors go to other slides easily. Usually, there are arrows and bullets which, in some cases, are not so noticeable.

One of the best in-slider navigation elements is the thumbnail. Thumbnails are small images, showing the content of each slide. The most popular way to create a slider is to show horizontal thumbnails below the slider. They have many benefits, they’re user friendly and they look great on any website.

Create nice looking, responsive thumbnail sliders

Smart Slider 3 has many great features to create a nice looking free thumbnail slider and it’s easy to create a slider with thumbnail navigation. When you have some images to show, all you need to do is to enable the thumbnail control. It allows you to place the thumbnails anywhere you want inside or around the slider. Also it’s possible to show them only when the mouse is above the slider.

Thumbnails are great and not just because they let the user know how many slides the slider has, and realize there are more content for them to see, but it is also an awesome way of navigation as they don’t have to go through many slides one by one if they would like to check a slide in the middle of the slider.

Customize your Thumbnail slider

There are many customization options for a thumbnail slider in Smart Slider 3. You can change the color of the thumbnail bar, add borders, box shadow or extra CSS codes. This allows you to place the thumbnail images wherever you would prefer to have them. You can set the size of the thumbnail images, and choose whether the slider switches on click or on hover.

Usually you can imagine a thumbnail as a preview of your slide but in Smart Slider 3 you don’t need to use the same image as your background, you can upload your own thumbnail image. By doing so, you can make a good navigation, and cheer up your slider.

What is even more, you can group the thumbnails. For example, you can make them show up in 3 rows, which is handy when there are many slides to see.

Thumbnails with title and description

Most of the thumbnail sliders let you show only the actual thumbnail image. However a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes words are needed to complete the story. Smart Slider 3 took a step forward and lets you display the slide title and description. This helps the visitor get a better idea of the slides’ content. Reading the title helps the visitor decide whether they want to check out the slide or not.

Video slider with horizontal thumbnail

Smart Slider 3 is not just a simple thumbnail slider plugin, but you can create video slider as well. You can display videos from YouTube, Vimeo or from your own server. But it’s not easy to tell by seeing a still image that the slide has a video. This is why we made an option to change the thumbnail type to video. Video thumbnails have a small play icon on them which lets the visitor know about the video on the slide.

Optimize your images in the slider

If you create a thumbnail slider, you probably have countless images you want to show. These images are often large which causes page loading. Not only the image dimensions are huge, but the actual file sizes as well. A large image takes a lot of time to load, and you don’t want to keep your visitors waiting too much.

Smart Slider 3 has many options for you to get back the page speed when you use a thumbnail slider. One of the most useful features in this list is the image optimization. It resizes the background images to the sliders or to a given size. It also resizes the thumbnails which gives you extra speed. You can lazy load the background images you use. This way instead of loading every image, the slider loads only a given amount of them.

Nice thumbnail slider effects

People love to see nice effects on websites they visit. Smart Slider 3 has many favored design effects which you can use to please your visitors’ needs. You can select the Ken Burns effect for the slide images in your thumbnail slider. This effect slowly zooms on the images and it’s a popular design choice by modern web designers.

Also popular feature is the Parallax effect in Smart Slider 3. You can choose from 3 different parallax modes, the best known is the slide background parallax. This time the slide background will be in a fixed position and while the visitor scrolls on the page, the images move and create the illusion of depth. But the slide changing parallax and layer parallax are very useful features too.

Sliders usually occupy a limited area on a page. This is especially true for a thumbnail slider, which is rarely used as a full width slider, but Smart Slider 3 has a lightbox feature which you can use to enlarge the currently viewed image. In a lightbox slider you can go through every image inside the slider, switching the slides as well. What is even more, you can create a mini-gallery via lightbox at every slide.

Conclusion

Using a thumbnail slider can be useful if you would like to navigate between the slides, or show a little preview of your slides. Visitors can see how many slides are there to be seen and the images are easy targets for mobile users. A slider with thumbnail navigation increases the user experience of the site, and they are nice bonuses to a slider.

Just enable the thumbnail control, upload your own thumbnail image or use the default from the slide background. Also you can display your slide title and the description, and you can customize them. It is good looking and responsive, and what is even more, you can use it in the free version of Smart Slider 3.

The post Create A Responsive Thumbnail Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

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

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

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

What is an image slider in WordPress?

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

How to create a responsive image slider?

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

What is Smart Slider 3?

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

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

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

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

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

Why should you use thumbnails for navigation?

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

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

Boost your image slider with lightbox

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

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

Engage your visitors with a wonderful image carousel

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

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

Spectacular image slideshow effects

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

Background animations

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

Ken Burns Effect

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

Parallax Slider Effect

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

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

Create an image slider quickly and easily

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

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

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

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

https://smartslider3.com/blog/testimonial-slider/ Mon, 30 Mar 2020 12:18:05 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=15039 It’s common to buy products or services online. However, before someone decides to spend money online, they study the vendor. The buyers always want to be certain they invest their money well. They look for happy owners of the particular product. This makes testimonials important parts of commercial websites. Testimonials help to build trust in […]

The post Best Testimonial Slider Examples for WordPress appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> It’s common to buy products or services online. However, before someone decides to spend money online, they study the vendor. The buyers always want to be certain they invest their money well. They look for happy owners of the particular product. This makes testimonials important parts of commercial websites. Testimonials help to build trust in your potential, but hesitant customers. With this in mind, testimonials are best written by your actual customers. Otherwise, you might lose the trust of future consumers, and your income as well.

How to get more testimonials? Cleverly ask customers for reviews. Ask your buyers, after they bought the product or services, to tell their experiences. Let them use their own words, as that makes the testimonial slider unique and more reliable. In other words, avoid asking your customers to rate you on a scale of one to ten. Rather, ask them to write a comment with their own words. Lead them with helpful questions! For example, ask them which feature they liked the most and why. Four or five questions like this can get you a nice testimony from the buyers. Keep in mind that a simple ten-star rating won’t ever be as powerful as someone stating “I love this product!”.

Why should you use a slider to display your testimonials?

When you sell something online, you want to convert visitors to customers as fast as possible. There are several ways to do this. For instance, it’s a popular way to put testimonials on the home page. Usually, they put them right before the buy now button, which can raise a problem. The testimonials can take up lots of vertical space as people love talking about things they like. So, your potential buyer has to spend their valuable time scrolling through a long list of text. But they wouldn’t have to do that. Exploring the benefits of video testimonials, particularly in slider format, could present a more engaging, time-efficient alternative for buyers. See, here’s the part where it matters what questions you asked from your buyers. If you asked the right questions, the first couple of testimonies have convinced the visitor. They’re trying to buy now – but they need to scroll a lot first.

So, why should you use a testimonial slider instead? Well, a testimonial slider saves you lots of vertical space. A testimonial slider shows the testimonial text submitted by your customers. The testimonies are presented in a beautiful, modern and mobile friendly way. The most important task of your website is to make sure your product or service and stand out from the crowd. An effective testimonial widget will prove your product or service trustworthy. The goal is to help to build trust between you and your customers and testimonial sliders help a lot with this.

So, why should you use a testimonial slider instead? Well, it shows the testimonial text submitted by your customers. Additionally, a testimonial slider saves you lots of vertical space. The testimonies are presented in a beautiful, modern and mobile friendly way. The most important task of your website is to make sure your product or service and stand out from the crowd. An effective testimonial widget will prove your product or service trustworthy. The goal is to help to build trust between you and your customers and testimonial sliders help a lot with this.

Create testimonial sliders with Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is an easy to use slider plugin. You can learn it fast and start creating beautiful sliders in minutes. It’s a great plugin you can use to create nice testimonial sliders for your WordPress site. Here are 6 reasons to choose Smart Slider 3 to create your testimonial widget:

1. It’s easy to learn how to use the plugin
2. You don’t need coding knowledge to create beautiful slider testimonials
3. You can create any layout you want.
4. Responsive and mobile friendly result
5. Visual, drag’n’drop slide editing
6. Several ready to use testimonial slider examples, which you can import with one click

Smart Slider 3 will help you create amazing WordPress testimonial sliders which convert. Once you create your beautiful testimonial slider, it’s easy to add it to your site via shortcode.

Next level testimonial sliders for the best user experience

When people display testimonials on their website, they rarely show only one testimony. As a matter of fact, the more testimonies you show, the better chances you have to convert the visitor. So there’s a big chance you’ll have more than 10 testimonials on your site. Why would that be a problem? When you need to update your testimonials for any reason, it’ll be time-consuming. Say, you decide you need to change the layout – you’d have to do that for every single testimonial slide. Smart Slider 3 comes to the rescue with its amazing feature: the dynamic slide generator. This feature makes Smart Slider 3 the best WordPress testimonial plugin available.

Display your testimonials using a dynamic slide generator

The dynamic slide generator is one of the most amazing features of Smart Slider 3. It’s capable of dynamically fetching content from your WordPress site. This includes posts, pages or custom post types as well. For example, you can create a new custom post type to store your testimonials. This way you can add testimonials by creating a new post. How’s that going to help to make changes in your testimonial slider fast and easily? I’m glad you asked.

When you work with a dynamic slide generator, you actually work on one single slide. All other slides are going to copy this layout. If you need to add a new layer, change a color or font family, you’ll need to do it only once. Dynamic slides make the testimonial slider creation process easy and convenient. If you do not need to make any layout changes to your slides, you don’t need to touch them. When you add a new post, the dynamic slide generator pulls it to your testimonial widget. This makes it easy to add or remove new testimonials and change the layout.

Stunning testimonial slider examples

Now you’ve learned why you should use a testimonial slider on your website. It’s time to see some inspiring examples, to create a beautiful testimonial slider. The samples below were created in Smart Slider 3, and you can import them to your website if you like them.

Simple Testimonial

The Simple Testimonial slider, as the name suggests, is a plain testimonial slider. It’s elegant and modern and it’s a great choice to show your testimonies. There’s a static background image behind each slide. The slide navigation is straightforward: there are arrows and bullets. The slider is mobile friendly, which means you can switch slides by swiping.

Static Testimonial

The Static testimonial slider is a great choice when you have a few testimonies to show. We’ve built it to display four testimonial texts, so it works best if you have the same number of testimonies. In the background you can see a nice video playing while you read the text. You can change the video to something more relevant to your product or service.

Testimonial Carousel

The Testimonial Carousel is the best way to show many testimonials in your WordPress carousel. Every testimony needs little space, and you can see three slides at a time. The structure is clear which makes this type of testimonial slider very effective.

Testimonial Thumbnail

Want to have a testimonial slider to show what the companies you’ve worked with say about you? Look no further! The Testimonial Thumbnail slider example is the perfect choice for this. Your future customer can navigate by clicking on the logos at the bottom. These logos are visible all the time on the slider, they’re easy to spot when the visitors scan your site. The slider is attractive so the visitor will check it out, even if they had no particular interest in your testimonials yet. Is there any better way to show how awesome your product or service is than showing which companies love it?

Testimonial Showcase

You don’t have avatars from your customers which you could show in your testimonial slider? No problem! The Testimonial Showcase slider demonstrates how important a good testimonial text is. If you have good text, you don’t need avatars to have a testimonial slider that converts. If you want to strengthen your message, drop a 5-star image to the slider, like in the demo above. Your visitors will love it! This slider has another great use. Have you got a page dedicated to each testimony? Use the Read more button to connect the page with each testimony slide.

Final Thoughts/Conclusion

Every online merchant needs to have customer testimonials on their website. Their words help to build trust, and it does matter how you present the testimonials. You don’t need fancy effects to have testimonials that convert. Nor should you want to waste the visitor’s time by forcing them to scroll for ages. It’s high time to get rid of the long, regular testimonials! Use a testimonial slider instead, which saves space on your site. It also shows your visitors you value their time and attention. Why not start building a testimonial slider now?

The post Best Testimonial Slider Examples for WordPress appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/how-to-create-a-wordpress-gallery-slider/ Wed, 25 Mar 2020 14:24:23 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=8436 If you want to know how to add a WordPress gallery slider to your website or blog, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly create a slider that displays images from your WordPress Media Library and then insert the slider into your blog posts and pages. We’ll then […]

The post How to Create a WordPress Gallery Slider for Your Website appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> If you want to know how to add a WordPress gallery slider to your website or blog, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly create a slider that displays images from your WordPress Media Library and then insert the slider into your blog posts and pages. We’ll then go on to explore a more powerful and creative plugin for adding even better WordPress gallery sliders to your website, all without the need to invest a penny.

But before we get started, let’s quickly define what a WordPress gallery slider is.

What is a WordPress Gallery Slider?

Typically, a WordPress gallery slider will allow you to display multiple images in a slideshow format. Instead of just inserting photographs or other images to a blog post or page, you can create a slider, add it to your content, and then let your visitors click or swipe through the slides.

Not only does this save space on your page, but it also makes it very convenient for your visitors to view your content. It also makes it easy for you to organize your images and other content in the way that you want. Creating collections of photographs or a sequence of slides that walks the visitors through a presentation or story is a great way to use a WordPress gallery slider.

Now that we’ve covered what a WordPress gallery slider is, we’ll look at what type of slideshows a widely used free plugin can create. Then we’ll share a more powerful, yet equally free tool, for adding even more stylish and advanced image gallery sliders to your WordPress website.

How to Create a Basic WordPress Gallery Slider

Although by default WordPress doesn’t have a slider feature, the Jetpack plugin – with its slider module — is regularly included with new WordPress installations. Therefore, using Jetpack is often the standard way to create an image gallery slider for many WordPress website owners.

We’ll see in this guide, there are other more powerful free options available.

Using the Jetpack WordPress Gallery Slider

To create a WordPress gallery slider with Jetpack, first check whether the Jetpack plugin is installed and active on your website by logging in to your site’s Dashboard and visiting the Plugins page. If Jetpack isn’t on the list of installed plugins, you can find instructions on how to add this tool to your website here. With Jetpack running on your site, create a new WordPress post or page and click on the Add Media button from the editor toolbar.

You can then upload the images you want to use in your WordPress gallery slider. Alternatively, you can select images that are already in your Media Library for use in your gallery slider. Once you’ve selected the images for your slider, click on the Create a new gallery button.

From the Edit Gallery screen that’s displayed next, you can choose Slideshow from the Type drop-down menu. After you’ve examined the other settings, you can click on the Insert gallery button.

The image slider should now be added to your to your post or page. To test out your WordPress gallery slideshow, click on the Preview button in the top right-hand corner of the page.

Now, after just a few steps, you should have a basic slideshow that displays the selected images from your WordPress gallery in a post or page on your website or blog.

However, while the Jetpack slider should be enough for creating basic WordPress gallery slideshows, if you want to create truly eye-catching and attention-grabbing sliders, you will have to choose a purpose-built slider plugin. Thankfully, there’s a free option that’s packed with features, while still being very easy to use.

Upgrade Your WordPress Gallery Sliders with Smart Slider 3

Yes, as you might’ve guessed, the recommend WordPress plugin for unlocking the full potential of what slideshows can deliver is our Smart Slider 3 plugin. Although there’s a paid version of Smart Slider 3 available, the free version of this plugin is much more powerful than the Jetpack slider module and many other WordPress slider plugins.

To give you a better idea of what Smart Slider 3 can do, as well as how easy it is to use, here’s a quick guide to creating a WordPress gallery slider with this free slider plugin.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

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

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

Creating a WordPress Gallery Slider with Smart Slider 3

As the free version of Smart Slider 3 is available from the official WordPress plugin directory, it can be installed from your WordPress site’s dashboard in just a few clicks.

Now with this free plugin active on your site, you can start adding much more creative and stylish WordPress gallery sliders to your website. To get started, simply navigate to the Smart Slider section of your WordPress dashboard by clicking on the appropriate sidebar menu link.

From the Smart Slider dashboard, you can view a tutorial that will help you get started, as well as check out the demo slider. Even those using the free version of Smart Slider 3 get access to some stylish slideshow templates that can be easily adapted for a range of projects.

But if you want to create your own WordPress gallery slider from scratch with this plugin, click on the New Slider icon to take the first step. You can then enter the name of your slider from this screen, as well as choosing the type of slideshow you want to build.

Smart Slider 3 can be used in a number of different ways, but one of the easiest ways to get started is to drag and drop your images on to the dashboard. You can then either preview or publish your slider for use on your WordPress website. That’s it.

However, scrolling down the page reveals the Smart Slider controls. From the control panel, you can easily choose the style of the playback buttons, enable or disable image thumbnails, and configure the optional animation settings.

Whether you simply want to drag and drop images onto the slider area and use the default settings or create a personalized slideshow, Smart Slider 3 makes it very straightforward.

Unlike with Jetpack, you can edit the individual slides in your Smart Slider 3 slideshows, defining how long each slide is displayed for, change the slide thumbnail image, and even add layers to your slides that contain text and other content including additional images. Adding clickable buttons to your WordPress gallery slider is straightforward with Smart Slider 3 too.

Publishing Your Smart Slider 3 WordPress Gallery Slideshow

Once you’re happy with your Smart Slider 3 WordPress gallery slideshow – or if you just want to see how it looks on your website – save your work, then create a new post or page or open an existing one for editing. The Smart Slider 3 plugin adds a handy button to the WordPress editor that makes it very easy to insert your slider into your content.

As well as using the Smart Slider 3 shortcode pictured above to insert the slideshow into your content, you can also use the provided PHP code to display your sliders in other parts of your website, by adding the code to your theme files. There’s also a widget for quickly adding sliders to the sidebars and the other widget-ready areas of your website.

Final Thoughts

Smart Slider 3 can do a lot more than just create WordPress gallery sliders. Even the free version has templates that make it easy to add multi-layer slides to your slideshow that consist of text, images, and other content. If you’re just looking for the quickest and easiest way to add WordPress gallery sliders to your website, Smart Slider 3 and its list of features definitely isn’t overkill.

Also, if you ever want to get even more creative with your slideshows and the other presentation elements of your website in the future, the optional Smart Slider 3 Pro plugin is never more than a few clicks away.

The post How to Create a WordPress Gallery Slider for Your Website appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.