How Do I Create a Slider in WordPress?

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

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

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

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

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

What Size Should Slider Images Be in WordPress?

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

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

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

How Do I Get an Image to Fit a Screen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do I Make a Slider Autoplay in WordPress?

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

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

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

How Do I Make a Responsive Slider in WordPress?

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

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

How Do I Create a Post Slider?

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Make a Dynamic Slider?

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

1. Create a Dynamic Slide

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

2. Set Up the Generator

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

3. Create Your Own Slider

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

4. Insert Variable

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

5. Publish the Slider

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

How Do I Make a Slider in Elementor?

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

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

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

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

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

How Do I Create a Product Slider in WordPress?

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

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

Live Preview

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

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

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

Engaging Product Slider Examples

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

Product Carousel

Live Preview

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

Full-Width Product Carousel

Live Preview

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

Full Page Product Slider

Live Preview

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

Showcase Product Slider

Live Preview

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making a difference between background images that are only aesthetic and those that have a purpose, we also discussed if alt tags are necessary for background images. Now we can conclude that while decorative background images don’t need alt tags, informative background images should have one. Besides, we went through methods for balancing accessibility and design.

Moreover, we looked into the step-by-step guide for precisely adding alt tags to background images in Smart Slider 3. By following the instructions, you can now make sure that background images also contribute to an inclusive user experience.

All things considered, you can make websites that are accessible to all users by implementing Smart Slider’s alt tags efficiently and following the best practices for writing alt text. It’s important to ensure that everyone has access to knowledge and experiences, keep in mind that web design accessibility is not an afterthought but a crucial element of the design process.

It’s time to put your newfound knowledge and useful insights from this post to use. Start including alt tags in all your web design projects, including those using Smart Slider 3. Let’s work together to build websites that embrace diversity and celebrate it, enabling everyone to navigate our digital world.

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How to use a slider on your website?

Sliders are versatile design elements that can fit any website. Because of that, there are good and bad ways to use them. In fact, I could write endless lists to tell you what you should or should not do with your slider. Instead here are five easy-to-follow rules to help you answer the question: should I use a slider?

• Create sliders with a purpose. When you put any element on your website, they must serve a purpose. No matter how tempting it is, don’t use a slider just for the sake of having one.
• Keep user experience in mind. Sliders are logical design elements, but that doesn’t mean you can forget about the visitor. Make sure any action you want them to take is easy and straightforward. If you add a CTA, make sure it’s easy to notice.
• Give control. It’s popular to make sliders play automatically. If you choose to do this, make sure to allow the visitor to stop the autoplay on demand.
• Give context. A large image on your home page without any context will do no good to your website. Besides, it’ll confuse your visitor and have a negative impact on your website. Add some text to the slides, like a heading, a description and a CTA button.
• Avoid too much content. There’s only one thing worse than a slider without any content: one that has way too much. Of course, too much content on a slider is rather subjective. But if your slider is full of text and there’s not a single empty line, you can be sure that its too much.

Why don’t people like sliders?

It’s hard to find any other design element that divides designers and developers as much as sliders do. The internet is full of articles claiming that sliders are evil and you shouldn’t use them.

On the other hand, there are many good sliders out there, but they’re being punished by other’s bad practices. Sliders aren’t as bad as some people try to make them seen. In fact, they’re versatile enough to let you use them for any purpose.

So here are the most common seven reasons you’ll find about why you shouldn’t use a slider.

1. Sliders lower conversion rate

Usually, people put sliders to the top of the page. This makes them use up their most important real estate, without urging users to take action. An article I found claims that even if you put a CTA button on each slide, visitors won’t click on them. Well, if you check out the example slider they used to support this theory, you can confirm it’s true. You need to focus on the slider to notice the subtle Shop now button.

In fact, a good slider plugin lets you create much better CTA for your slider, which stands out and easy to see. A good CTA on your slider increases the conversion rate, because it gets clicked.

2. Sliders cause banner blindness

That was one of the most popular reasons I’ve seen. Banner blindness, in case you’re wondering, means that people ignore a section of a website, because it looks like an advertisement. People don’t like ads, that’s why adblock extensions are so popular. If your slider looks like a banner or advertisement, visitors won’t notice them.

The Neilson Norman group ran a usability study back in 2013. The visitor had to go to Siemens’ website and see if there are any special deals on washing machines. On this site, there were two sliders, which failed to do this simple task.

Here’s the biggest problem with the sliders on that page: they look like an ad, which people ignore. To make things worse, the top slider keeps rotating every 5 seconds. Now imagine you just arrived to the website and try to read and understand the first slide in five seconds. It’s an impossible task, no wonder the visitor ignored the slider.

3. Sliders are not SEO friendly

SEO is an important factor for every serious website. Therefore, website owners carefully choose what to put to their site to make it SEO friendly. However, their efforts are pointless if they add an element that isn’t SEO friendly. As a matter of fact, some people think sliders destroy the SEO of the page they’re on.

The fact that there are many sliders, which aren’t SEO friendly in 2020 is disturbing. But not all slider plugins follow the bad example. For instance, Smart Slider 3 is an SEO friendly slider plugin. As a result, it will not only not ruin your SEO, but it can help improving it.

4. They move too fast

I’m sure you’ve came across shouldiuseacarousel.com when you were trying to decide if you should use a slider. This website builds its argument on user experience.

The slider they use autoplays, like lots of other sliders do. Not only that, it moves so fast, it’s impossible to read the content of the slides. This forces the visitor to keep switching back to be able to read each slide’s content.

Here’s the thing: sliders don’t have to autoplay. Neither do they have to autoplay fast and sacrifice the user experience. In case you really need autoplay, then rather allow the user to stop and restart it when needed. But you can completely forget about autoplaying your slider. Instead of autoplay, consider giving full control to the user. Create CTA buttons, which switch slides when the visitors clicks them. This way the visitors get what they like the most: control over the content.

5. Sliders aren’t responsive

We’re living in an era, where over 60% of mobile users browse the internet from phone. This is a large number, which justifies the need of a good, responsive website. Despite the large demand, there are still many sliders, which are not responsive. Because of that, the site they’re on won’t be responsive anymore.

Smart Slider 3 isn’t one of the not-responsive slider plugins. In fact, it offers many options to optimize your slider for mobile devices. Because of this, you don’t need to worry about the responsive behavior of your slider if you choose Smart Slider 3.

6. Sliders are slow and will slow down your website

A heavy slider on your home page drastically slows it down. It also wastes important real estate on your site. For this reason many people suggest using a hero image or a static image instead of a slider. Unlike most sliders, these elements need only one image, which reduces the files the side has to load.

But a good slider plugin, like Smart Slider 3, cares about the speed of your website. It has cool optimization features, like lazy loading or image resizing. As a result, your website can load faster – even with a gorgeous slider on it!

7. They have accessibility problems

There are many examples and recommendations to help developers make their slider accessible. But many developers choose not to follow them. As a result, their product ends up having accessibility problems. Their users are left with two choices: drop the slider or fail to make their website accessible.

We know how important it is for everyone to be able to browse the web in a convenient way. This is why we developed Smart Slider 3 with accessibility in mind. In fact, we always improve the slider’s accessibility.

Conclusion

After reading many articles on the topic, I’ve came to a surprising conclusion. While all articles claim that sliders are bad, it seems it’s not the actual sliders that they don’t like. It’s rather the sliders’ design choices and the way they were set up.

Indeed, they’re right in some ways. If a slider isn’t user friendly, or bad for SEO or not responsive, it has no place on a website. But a slider that fulfills these criterion and is made well has its place. After all, sliders are the most versatile design tools you can use. So if you still haven’t answered the “should I use a slider?” question, there’s one last thing you need to know.

Sliders aren’t evil, they’re just not used well.

The post Should I use a Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

https://smartslider3.com/blog/slider-seo/ Wed, 13 May 2020 07:14:58 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=19462 SEO is crucial to make people find your website. It doesn’t matter how awesome your site and services are if no one can find you. But did you know you could use your slider for SEO purposes? Sliders are the most popular design elements you can find on a WordPress site, so it makes sense […]

The post How to Make your Slider SEO Friendly? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> SEO is crucial to make people find your website. It doesn’t matter how awesome your site and services are if no one can find you. But did you know you could use your slider for SEO purposes? Sliders are the most popular design elements you can find on a WordPress site, so it makes sense to use them for SEO. In order to do that, the slider must support the most essential SEO tools.

How do you recognize an SEO friendly slider?

It depends on the developers, whether a slider is bad for SEO or not. With this in mind, let’s see the top five aspects of an SEO friendly slider.

1. It’s not based on flash. Flash is an old technique, which was quite popular because of its fancy effects. Its popularity is fading, because no search engine can crawl its result. If a slider uses flash, it’s not SEO friendly, and you shouldn’t use that slider on your site.
2. It lets you write alt texts to your images. Alt texts help search engines index your images. It’s especially important when you create simple image sliders, which have no other text.
3. Ability to set proper H tags. H tags, like h1 or h2 help you structure your content better. A well structured content is crucial from SEO perspective. As a matter of fact, there should be only one h1 tag on each page of your site. So if your slider creates headings with h1 tag only and you can’t change that, dump this WordPress plugin.
4. Ability to write texts without H tags. Not all content needs to be a heading. A good slider plugin lets you add texts as paragraphs, too.
5. Has valid HTML structure. Search engines have a hard time indexing pages, which have invalid HTML structure. If your slider contains invalid codes, it will make your site and slider harder to index.

How to use your slider for SEO purposes?

Obviously, you can only use your slider for SEO purposes, if it’s SEO friendly. As a matter of fact, Smart Slider 3 is an SEO friendly slider, which means you can use it to do SEO. Any text you write to Smart Slider 3 using layers is crawlable by search engines. Let’s see what tools are available to create an SEO friendly slider!

Structure your slider using the heading layer

The heading tags you add to your site define the structure of your page. When people browse your site, they look for information. Headings give the reader an idea of the information they can get from the next paragraph. They’re also great to break the text up increasing its legibility.

The heading’s other main purpose is to structure your content. To make the structure more obvious for the reader, you can use different font sizes for the headings. For instance, decrease the font size for each lower heading you add. To put it another way, if you add an h2 heading which has 32px font size, use lower for the h3 headings.

Add SEO friendly content into your slider

Headings are crucial for SEO, but they can’t help much without having a good content. That awesome text is what you can place to the text layer. You should treat these texts the same way you would treat any other SEO text. Make sure it’s well written and interesting for the reader. Then place it on your slider in a clear format.

If you want to add captions to your images, you should use a text layer for that as well. It allows the search engines to crawl the text and that helps your SEO ranking. Furthermore, layers are actually responsive and can keep their legibility on mobile devices. Unfortunately, this isn’t true for texts which are part of the image. As a matter of fact, responsiveness is another important part of SEO.

Add alt text to your images to help search engines index them

Smart Slider 3 has a field to enter alt text for every image layer and background image. This helps search engines to crawl it, as if it were a static image. Of course, you should avoid using too high resolution images. They slow the site loading down, which can cause bad user experience.

Another key point of creating SEO friendly images is the actual name of the image. From SEO perspective, a relevant name is much better than a generic one. For instance, if you add an image which shows the Golden Gate Bridge, don’t name it DSC1523.jpg. Name it something like Golden_Gate_Bridge_San_Fransisco.jpg instead.

How does slider SEO work in real life?

If you feel using a slider for SEO purposes is too good to be true, then let’s see a real life example as proof. We have a couple of landing pages which only contain sliders. Of course, every slider is made with Smart Slider 3. One of these pages is the product page of Smart Slider 3 Free. Next to Real Time Slide Editor you can find the following image:

As you can see, the name of the image is realtimeeditor.png and its Alt tag is “Smart Slider Free – Slide Editor”. Thanks to this, Google knows the image and it was able to index it. Do an image search for the following keywords: “Smart Slider Free Slide Editor”. You’ll notice that the image shows up as the 6th result. Since it’s one of the first results, this 6th place is pretty great.

Can search engines read texts from the slider?

Of course they can! As an example, let’s take a deeper look at Gradient slider template. The page of this slider isn’t optimized for SEO. We’re only using it to demonstrate the template. Nevertheless, search engines can read the content from the slider. Let’s perform a simple search for “more than 70.000 happy users”. While the page wasn’t optimized for SEO, it shows up in the first page. Not only was Google able to find the page, it read both the h2 heading and the paragraph below.

As you can see from the screenshot, search engines like Google can read text from Smart Slider 3. Which means you can use Smart Slider 3 for SEO.

How smart search engines really are?

Developers at Google have made massive effort to understand web pages better. They no longer rely only on the page source to learn what is on the page. This means they run the codes on the website, or at least try to do so. Why is this good for your WordPress site? Because web development has developed a lot in the past years. There’s more and more JavaScript generated content on modern websites.

Of course, the search engines aren’t looking at pages like users do. Users, for instance, interact with the page. They click on animating elements or images, they check out tabs and accordions. Visitors scroll up and down checking out interesting effects. Search bots, on the other hand, simply crawl the page as it is when the page has finished loading.

What’s lazy loading and how does it affect your SEO slider?

When it comes to image loading optimization, people tend to think about lazy loading first. Lazy loading is generally done by JavaScript codes which runs some after the page has loaded. It’s a common approach to load the images on page scroll, and that’s something that search bots can’t mimic. At the present time, they can’t browse your site the same way as a real visitor does.

The situation with lazy loading and sliders is that the lazy loaded images show up on user request. In most cases, this request is the slide switching action. For instance, the visitor has checked out the content on your current slide and switches to the next. That’s the trigger that makes the second image appear. Unfortunately, this means lazy loading isn’t SEO friendly. The reason is rather simple: the images don’t exist on the website, until the slide switching happens.

What do you need to know about texts effects in your slider from SEO perspective?

Modern web designs are full of special text effects which only JavaScript can create. In Smart Slider 3, for instance, these effects are the split text animation and the typewriter. These effects look cool and appealing for visitors. Unfortunately, they’re not SEO friendly. To create, for instance, the typewriter effect, the code needs to split up the text to characters. Because of that, search engines don’t see them as words, but individual letters.

Conclusion

When you create a slider and keep SEO best practices in mind, this slider becomes a great asset on your site. In addition, if you create your slider and pay attention to its details, it won’t cause banner blindness. You can use a slider to save real estate on your home page or landing page, while strengthening your message.

After all, that’s what visitors came to your site for the first place: to find the information they look for. And if you structure your site well, they can find that information in your slider. Similarly, the search engines can find information in your slider as long as you use Smart Slider 3. So good luck on creating awesome sliders for SEO purposes!

The post How to Make your Slider SEO Friendly? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.