What is a full width slider?

Before we dig into the details, let’s learn what a full-width slider is. A full width slider is the kind of slider, that fills the horizontal area of the browser. But these sliders do not fill the height of the browser. Generally speaking, the height of the full width slider depends on the browser width. The wider the browser, the higher the slider, which makes it look amazing on today’s wide monitors. Speaking of which, it’s mandatory for any image slider to be responsive and look good on every device. A full width slider fulfills this purpose perfectly.

Meet Smart Slider 3: the best free full width slider plugin

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated free full width slider plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. More than 800.000 happy users choose this free full width slider for their website. The slider looks and feels like a premium slider, but it’s totally free. What’s even more, it offers every option to create a beautiful responsive full width image slider. There are beautiful transitions to choose from, and the slides can autoplay. Smart Slider 3 is a responsive WordPress slider plugin, which you can use to enhance your site’s look.

Why should you choose Smart Slider 3 as your responsive slider plugin?

Smart Slider 3 has many options to make you want to call it your favorite slider plugin. Apart from being free, there are several reasons to choose it. It lets you create any layout you imagine. There’s also beautiful slider templates which help you get started. Do you need a simple image slider? Smart Slider 3 lets you create such sliders with ease. The best part is that Smart Slider 3 won’t let you down even if you need to add content to your slides.

Enrich your slider with content using layers

Every website has a story waiting to be told. If you use Smart Slider 3, you can tell this story using layers. You can create headings, add long paragraphs or buttons. Of course you can customize every layer to your liking. For instance, you can change the font color and size. If your site uses a specific font family, you can use that in the slider, too. You can edit your layers using a visual editor, so you don’t need any coding knowledge.

Love using rich media? Smart Slider 3 lets you add image and video layers, too. An image layer can be great to add icons or other design elements. Videos, of course, are very helpful to enrich your slider with visual content. You can add videos from YouTube and Vimeo to your slides. They have their own options to configure them to your liking. For instance, there’s an option to set a cover image or make the video autoplay.

Control your slider’s responsive look

Smart Slider 3 is a responsive slider, and lets you adjust your layers to each device. You can change the position of the layers and their spacing, too. This way you can ensure that the slides look great on every device. If you have textual layers, you can increase or decrease the font size to ensure legibility. Is your slider too crowded on small screens? You can hide any layer on any device to make some room.

How to create a free full width slider using Smart Slider 3?

While Smart Slider has lots of useful features, creating a full width slider is an easy task. First, click on New Project. Then select Create a New Project, where you can configure the basics of your project.

During the project creation process, you’ll need to enter a slider size. You need to do this to be able to work with the slide editor, and to set the dimensions of your slider. If you created a slider that wasn’t full width before, you can change this with a click of a button at the Size tab of its settings. Of course you can also change the size of the slider.

A good free full width slider plugin is feature packed. Smart Slider 3 has many useful options to further control the slider size. For instance, if you want to avoid that your slider gets too small, you can set up a Minimum slider height. Do you want to prevent your full width slider from getting too large on big screens? Use the Maximum slider height feature. If you use Smart Slider 3, best tools are at your fingertips to create a great free full width slider.

Create Beautiful full width Post sliders

Despite the fact that WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform, many people still use it for this reason. Blogs have great and interesting content, which is often featured on the homepage of the site. The best way to have many blog posts on the homepage is using a post slider. Smart Slider 3 is a great free full width slider plugin, which lets you create unique content for your site. This versatile slider has another great feature for you to use on your site. With Smart Slider 3, you have the ability to create a dynamic post slider.

Compatible with every theme

Smart Slider 3 is compatible with every WordPress theme. You can use any widget position, the theme offers to display your full width slider. Of course, you can publish the slider to your posts or pages, too, using its shortcode. In addition, Smart Slider 3 supports the most popular page builder plugins available. If you use Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder or Page Builder by Site Origin, you don’t have to bother with shortcodes. You’ll find a special Smart Slider 3 module in your favourite page builder.

Final thoughts

A good responsive slider is an essential part of every modern website. Whether you want a simple image slider, or a layer slider, Smart Slider 3 will help you achieve your goals. You’ll also love the responsive settings the slider offers. You can use them to create the perfect slider for every device. Why not give this free full width slider plugin a try?

The post Do you need a Free Full Width Slider for your Site? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

There’s, of course, nothing wrong with having a website that looks great, but bears a resemblance to those of the competition. However, a website needs to make conversions in order to survive, which means beating the competition. So, how do you design a website in a way that makes it stand apart from the sea of lookalikes? One way to do this is by using a professional-grade and responsive content slider.

While a content slider won’t make sense for every website, when used in the right context and executed well, it can have a powerful impact on your audience.

In this ultimate guide to the content slider, we’ll delve a bit deeper into what exactly a content slider is and what it can do for your website. We’ll then discuss how to use the Smart Slider 3 to take your slider capabilities to the next level.

Should your website have a content slider?

A content slider goes by many names: slider, carousel, slideshow, and so on. Regardless of what you call it, the rotating element works the same way. It fills a designated space on your site–almost always the full (or near-full) width of the page–and it enables your visitors to flip through slides in order to consume various pieces of content at their own pace.

This can be a really helpful addition to your site–not only for you as the designer or developer trying to be smart about how you utilize available real estate, but also for your visitors.

With a content slider, you can…

Promote new blog content in a dynamic fashion, keeping the latest posts front.
Advertise the newest products, promotions, or news on the home page.
Provide a highlight reel about what’s happening with your company right now.

Consolidate videos into a single space, so visitors know where to go to watch your collection of stories, tutorials, etc.
Group related images or videos for products, properties, or services, thereby enabling visitors to see different views or uses for them without having to scroll or move to new pages.
Display a creative portfolio in a manner that’s concise, yet still absolutely eye-catching.
Tell a story or provide some other sequential narrative that users will feel compelled to click through and follow.
Share textual snippets, whether they be a collection of testimonials, statistics about your business, or inspirational quotes from recent stories or interviews you published.

So long as you use a slider for the right reasons and positively contribute to the user experience by helping your audience ingest content more quickly and conveniently, a content slider will be a great addition to your website. In sum, these are just some of the benefits generally associated with the proper use of a content slider:

• Minimalism: When you have related content or media, consolidating them into a slider could help you clean up your site’s design.
• Usability: There’s also the effect this has on your users’ ability to skim through content. Rather than force them to scroll or visit multiple pages, it’s all now in one convenient location and within a tool they can control the pace of.
• Aesthetics: Sliders give you the opportunity to show off; it doesn’t matter if you’re highlighting written or visual content. Sliders just make it look good.
• Engagement: Even if you don’t set the content slider to autoplay, the moment your visitors hover over the space and see the directional cues, this will trigger them to engage with the slider in order to view more.
• SEO: Because a slider requires users to move through more slides in order to discover new content, this increases the amount of time they spend on your pages; thus, leading to improved SEO.

As you can see, there is a lot you can accomplish by adding a content slider to your website. Now, let’s focus on how to actually do this.

How to build a content slider on your website with Smart Slider 3

Now, of course, the content that appears on your slider plays a critical role here, too. It’s not enough to just decide that a sliding element would look cool on your homepage or to host your portfolio of images. You have to figure out what kind of content to include on your slider.

Didn’t think that was possible or even an option? If you’re using the Smart Slider 3 plugin, you can build anything with the available layers, slider types, background animations, and other features.

So, let’s talk about the different types of content you can add to your slider while taking a closer look at how to add them with the Smart Slider 3 plugin. To add a new content layer to your slide, click on the green plus sign in the top-left corner:

Choose your content type

Heading Layer

A heading layer is especially important for content slides as structured text tell readers how to prioritize the reading of it. In other words, larger heading type should be read first as it usually encapsulates what the slide is about. With this layer, you can adjust everything related to the stylization of heading text including: The message, font family, font size, alignment, font color, background color, opacity, animation, hyperlinked text and more.

Text Layer

The text layer comes next. The header introduces the title or a succinct summary of the slide and the text will provide a deeper description. With this layer, you have the same controls as you do with the header layer. The main difference is in how you choose to present the text on different devices and screen sizes.

Button Layer

For some slider designs, you might not need button (or call-to-action) elements. This is only there if you want to give visitors something to click through to. So, if you’re using your slider to promote a product, service, or want to educate them on something, this is a good opportunity to add a button that directs them to the next steps and convert.

Image Layer

If you’re not using a full-width image or video background for your slides, you can populate it with partial image content instead. Simply upload the photo you want to use and drag it into your slide. Image content can sit beside, atop, below, and in the middle of your text content. It’s up to you how you want to arrange your slides.

Caption Layer

Not every image-based slide will look good with or even make sense to use an overlay of text. Instead, if you want to provide some sort of reference to visitors about the content found on the slide, but don’t want to intrude on the experience, you can add the caption layer.

YouTube, Vimeo and Video Layer

There are a few different options for adding video content to your slides: YouTube, Vimeo, and Video. Each of these simplify the process of embedding video content from another source, even giving you the option to upload your own cover image to ensure the screengrab that shows is relevant and looks good.

In addition, there’s also an Audio layer option available in Smart Slider 3, in case you want to share a podcast or soundbyte on your slide.

Icon Layer

Icons are a perfectly succinct element which, at the same time, convey a lot of information to your visitors. Usually, these aren’t used in isolation unless you add an icon to your CTA button. Instead, you’ll find groupings of icons that are representative for a number of different services or products on a company website. With hundreds of Font Awesome icons to choose from with Smart Slider 3, you should find exactly what you’re looking for.

List Layer

The list layer feature will come in handy when writing corresponding product descriptions or if you’re creating on-site slideshows to share with your visitors. It’s simple to use too: just input your list items, choose the bulletpoint style, and then apply the text settings as you would in the other text layers.

Progress Bar

The Progress Bar is an excellent way to graphically display information within a slide. It’s perfect for highlighting the skills your team members possess, how many cups of coffee everyone drank last month, or some other fun tidbit you want to relay to your visitors.

In addition to adding the right type of content to your slider, keep in mind the following best practices when designing it:

• Make it responsive: Most sliders simply downscale the content. However, Smart Slider 3 has a Default layers, which recognizes the available space and adjusts accordingly.
• Place the most important content on the first slider or two: Studies have found those are the ones that get the most views and clicks, so don’t make your visitors wait for the good stuff.
• Optimize for search: In addition to using a plugin that makes your slider seamlessly blend with the rest of your site’s design, you need one that helps your SEO. Smart Slider 3 includes all HTML tags and attributes in order to make your sliders search-friendly.
• Set slide durations that aren’t too fast or too slow: And always remember to give your users some way to control the speed on their own if the presets aren’t to their liking.
• Remember that your audience, marketers, and even some developers have a love-hate relationship with sliders: If you want to stay in their good graces, ensure that your sliders only include high-quality, valuable, and relevant content.