Articles in Divi Tag — Blog — Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin

The Ultimate Guide to Create a Divi Slider

Bernadett Toth — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:28:38 +0000

Divi by Elegant Themes is one of the most popular WordPress theme and page builder available today. This page builder is a drag and drop editor in which you can create a whole website. There are a lot of available modules that you can choose from, and which makes it easier to create a website. In this article, I will introduce the available slider modules in Divi. Also, I will show you a slider plugin alternative which can make your website more unique.

Divi Slider modules

Using a slider or a block on your website isn’t a new thing nowadays. Page builders like Divi already have options to create a slider module for your page, which is the easiest and fastest solution to create a slider. Divi offers 3 kinds of slider modules: a simple slider, a video slider and a post slider module.

Available Divi slider modules

Let’s take a look at these modules!

Slider module

Divi slider module can be a great solution if you want to place a basic slider on your page. Every setting is inside the Divi builder, and you can instantly check if the design fits or not.

This slider is a great slider module that you can use to showcase images or videos, display some text, and also you can put a CTA on it. For this reason, it can be a quick way to create a hero slider. You also have customization options, like setting the typography, colors or the style of your bullets. The slider has an option to set a slider background image, where you can adjust the size of the image. Additionally, you can put an overlay on it. And you can even add a parallax effect which can make your site more professional.

👍 GOOD

Easy to use
Parallax background
Video background
Hide slider on devices

👎 BAD

You can’t change the order of your slide content
Limited structure

Video slider

Divi offers another slider module to create a video slider on your page. With this module, you can organize your videos. You can use any source, for instance, you can put any YouTube or Vimeo link, or you can upload your own mp4 video. So it is up to you which one you want to use. There are customization options similar to the other slider module. In addition, you can customize the thumbnail images and the play button as well.

👍 GOOD

You can use any type of video
Easy way to create a video gallery

👎 BAD

No autoplay option
Every time the video starts from the beginning

Post slider

Creating a dynamically changing post slider is great to showcase our latest or featured posts. Divi offers a post slider module where you can display your latest post, define how many articles you want to showcase and in which order. You can set the featured image as the slide background, display the post title and meta, and put a read more button which links to the post itself.

👍 GOOD

Dynamically changing content
You can choose from categories
Customizable post count and order

👎 BAD

Limited design and structure

How to create better Divi sliders?

The slider modules in Divi are great but I think they are a bit limited. If you want to create a more customizable slider, it’s worth finding a slider plugin that is compatible with Divi. Smart Slider is one of the best slider plugins in WordPress. Even the free version has great features that you can start with. Smart Slider helps you create custom designs, and you can customize every layer. This plugin has a Divi module, so you can publish it as usual.

Hopefully, you want to know how the Smart Slider 3 plugin can upgrade the Divi slider functionality. One of the most important improvements is that you can create slideshows with more than 4 layers in custom order and placement.

Smart Slider has a layer list where you can choose from more types of layers. The rows and columns help you to structure them. You have the option to align your layers vertically and horizontally, set a maximum width, change any colors or typography, so you can create a unique design. If it isn’t enough, you can use absolute positioning on your layers to design the slider. By combining the different layers and positions, you can create some truly unique websites with Smart Slider 3 and Divi.

How to use Smart Slider 3?

Smart Slider is a slider plugin that is available for free in the WordPress repository. Just simply download, and activate it. Then you can start creating your slider. There are many pre-built templates that you can start with, but you have the option to start from scratch.

If you are ready with your slider, publish it with the Smart Slider Divi module.

Comparing Divi slider module and Smart Slider

Let me compare the basic Divi slider and the free and pro versions of Smart Slider. I really think that the Divi slider module is a great module of Divi, because it has a lot of customization options, and it is inside in Divi. Everything is in one place, and you don’t need to know a new interface. But the functionality is limited because you can’t create the layout you want.

If you want a more specific layout where you can place your layers where you want, and you can create a more unique content, consider using Smart Slider 3. The free version offers a lot of features like the Divi module, and with the Pro, you don’t have limits.

Let’s see some relevant differences!

	Divi slider module	Smart Slider 3 Free	Smart Slider 3 Pro
Layers	5	6	23
Typography options	✅	✅	✅
Drag & Drop interface	❌	✅	✅
Background image	✅	✅	✅
Background video	mp4, WEBM	❌	mp4
Parallax effect	✅	❌	✅
Layer animations	❌	❌	✅
Transitions	✅	✅	✅
Controls	2	5	7
Dynamic variables	✅	✅	✅
Static overlay	❌	✅	✅
Autoplay	❌	✅	✅

Interface

The main difference is the interface. There’s no doubt that Divi makes it easy to add sliders to your WordPress website. Simply enter text in the set fields and then upload some images and your slider is ready to go. However, when it comes to functionality and letting you create impressive sliders, the Divi slider does have some limitations. Nonetheless in Smart Slider, you can use a drag and drop slide editor, and you can place your layers where you want.

Animations and effects

With background animation modes you can easily bring your design to life. Divi has a basic animation option, which you can cheer up your slider, but in Smart Slider 3 Pro you can choose from 3 kinds of animations: main animation, background animation and unique layer animations.

Customizable controls

Each slider module has options to customize the controls, but in Smart Slider, you have more ways to make them unique. You can put the controls into other positions, change the colors, spacing, or hide them on different devices. Besides in Smart Slider 3 you have options to display thumbnails which you can create an image gallery styled thumbnail slider.

Slider autoplay

Smart Slider offers slider autoplay which is a popular feature at most slider plugins. This way the slider switches slides after a while. This can call the visitors’ attention but if you don’t like autoplaying sliders, then you can simply disable this setting.

Why should you choose Smart Slider 3 as your Divi Slider?

If you like simple and basic things, maybe you don’t want to install another plugin and learn how it works to create a slider. Divi also has slider modules, so why should you use a different plugin to create a slider? Let’s see some features which can help you decide to choose Smart Slider or not.

Slider types in Smart Slider. Top row: Simple (Free) and Carousel (Pro). Bottom row: Block (Free) and Showcase (Pro)

Reasons to choose Smart Slider 3 Free

It’s free. The free version of Smart Slider is available on the WordPress repository, you don’t need to pay for it.
The freedom of creating a slider. You can create a complicated layout thanks to the rows, columns, and the positioning options.
Customizable controls. Use your arrows, bullets, thumbnails, text bar the way as you imagined. Position them, change their colors, or disable if you don’t want to display them.
Ready to use templates. In Smart Slider 3 you can start with pre-built templates, which are fully customizable. Just change the content or the images and you have a ready slider.

Free Smart Slider templates

Responsive sliders. With minimal effort, you can create a slider that looks good on any device.

Reasons to choose Smart Slider 3 Pro

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how Smart Slider 3 can upgrade your ability to add slideshow presentations to your Divi website. But if you’re still not sure let’s see some features of Smart Slider 3 Pro!

Slider types. In the Pro version, you can find every type of slider which can fit on any page: full-page and full-width sliders, carousels, showcase sliders, and blocks.
Lots of layers. Smart Slider 3 and its 23 layer types give you much more creative freedom. If you do choose Smart Slider 3 as your new slider tool, then layers for icons, progress bars, counters, and even mp4 videos can be used to add content-rich slideshows to your website.
Much more templates. Smart Slider 3 definitely isn’t short on fully customizable templates either. Choosing an option from the collection of complete pre-built sliders and a library of individual slides can help you save time and overcome any design-related shortcomings you might have.
Popular available effects. The pro version offers lots of effects that you can set, like Parallax, Ken Burns, Particle, Shape Divider. All of them are customizable and can cheer up a single slider, too.
Layer animations. You can add layer animations on the individual layers of your slides. They can come in, loop, go out, repeat, so you can create even complex animations if you want.
Lightbox. The pro version offers the lightbox feature, so you can enlarge your images or videos or even an iframe in a popup. It’s a popular feature which can also save place on your webpage.
Dynamic sources. Smart Slider 3 goes beyond just allowing you to use posts for the content of your dynamic sliders. Displaying WooCommerce products, custom post types, and content from popular WordPress events plugins is all supported.
One time payment and lifetime support. Finally, I should mention that if you buy the Pro version, you need to pay only once, and you will get lifetime updates and support!

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of great reasons to use Smart Slider 3 to add sliders to your Divi website. You can build more creative, good-looking and unique slideshows with Smart Slider 3 compared to the Divi slider modules. If you need a simple slider, then you can use the basic Divi module, but if you need more, then use Smart Slider. With Divi and Smart Slider 3 together you can make a powerful page with a unique slider. If you want to give it a try, don’t hesitate, install the free version of Smart Slider 3 first, and give it a try. And if you like it and need more features, then you can upgrade.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Create a Divi Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Give the Divi Slider an Upgrade with Smart Slider 3

Joe Fylan — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 09:12:41 +0000

Divi from Elegant Themes is one of the most popular WordPress themes available today and if you’re using this theme or thinking about choosing it for your website, this article looking at the Divi slider tool is for you.

The Divi feature list looks great on paper, sometimes you can get better results from using a separate purpose-built plugin alongside Elegant Themes’ flagship WordPress template.

One example of this is the Divi slider tool. While you might be tempted to stick with the default Divi slider module, you could be doing yourself and your website a huge disservice. In this article, we’ll explain why you might want to consider giving the Divi slider an upgrade and what extra features you could unlock for your website by doing so.

Want to jump to a section quickly?

🖼️ Divi Slider Module
🎨 Layer Options
👩‍🎨 Creative Freedom
🎬 Animation Options
▶️ Playback Control Settings
🏞 Slideshow Variations
🎓 Upgrade the Divi Slider Tools
🤔 Final Thoughts

🖼️ About the Divi Slider Module

The Divi slider is one of the many modules you can add to your page design. Available at the touch of a button, when it comes to convenience for Divi users, this slider is hard to beat. However, when it comes to functionality and letting you create impressive slideshows, the Divi slider does have some limitations, especially compared to more purpose-built built WordPress slider plugins.

Default Divi Slider Example

You could get by with just the default Divi slider module. But if you really want to make the most of your website and get the best results from it, installing a plugin like Smart Slider 3 alongside the Divi theme has many benefits. If you’re worried about compatibility between Divi and Smart Slider 3, there’s no need. The plugin slots right into the Divi user experience.

🎨 Layer Options

Hopefully you’re curious about how the Smart Slider 3 plugin can upgrade the Divi slider functionality. One of the most important improvements you’ll have access to if you choose this plugin and theme combination is the ability to create slideshows with more than three layers.

Divi Slider – with the 3 Available Elements

The three Divi heading, text, and button content layers might be enough for the most basic of sliders. But for everything else, Smart Slider 3 and its 23 layer types gives you much more creative freedom. If you do choose Smart Slider 3 as your new slider tool, then layers for icons, progress bars, counters, and even videos can be used to add content-rich slideshows to your website.

23 Available Layers in Smart Slider 3

By combining the different layers and the content types they support, you can create some truly unique website with Smart Slider 3 and Divi.

👩‍🎨 Creative Freedom

There’s no doubt that Divi makes it easy to add sliders to your WordPress website. Simply enter text in the set fields and then upload some images and your slider is ready to go.

Divi Slider Options

Of course, Divi does have settings that give you some control over how your slider and its content will look and behave. But for the most part, this simplicity comes at a cost and that cost is creative freedom. Compared to a purpose-built slideshow plugin like Smart Slider 3 that gives you a blank canvas to work from when creating and arranging the content on each slide, you can quickly see how restricted you are with the Divi slider.

Unique Layout with Smart Slider 3

Thanks to the absolute positioning, with Smart Slider 3 you’re free to drag and drop elements around the slide, resize them, and customize them in a number of different ways. By taking advantage of the lack of a fixed structure, you really can build what you want with Smart Slider 3.

🎬 Animation Options

We’ve already seen that Smart Slider 3 lets you choose from a varied selection of content types for your slides while also giving you the freedom to place the items anywhere on your slide canvas. Another reason to add this plugin to your Divi-powered website is the ability to add a range of animation effects to your sliders, block and their contents.

Smart Slider 3 Background Animation

With background animation modes including rotating, parallax, tiles, rows, puzzle, and spinning cuboid to name just a few, you can easily bring your design to life. As well as adding animations to the slide background, you can also apply them to the individual layers of your slides.

As before, you can instantly preview the animation effects in real time to find the right one for your presentation. Using custom triggers to control the animation effects, as well as enabling looping or one-time animation playback is all part of the Smart Slider 3 toolkit.

Once you take into account other animation features like the layer timeline, Smart Slider 3 becomes the obvious choice for adding animated slideshows to your WordPress website. Furthermore, as everything has been designed to be as lightweight as possible, making the most of the animation effects shouldn’t slow down your site.

▶️ Playback Control Settings

Divi Slider Controls

Like the other aspects of the Divi slider covered so far, when it comes to playback controls, you can add functional controls to your slider with Divi. However, if you want greater creative freedom to define how your slider controls look and work, again, Smart Slider 3 will definitely appeal.

Arrow Controls in Smart Slider 3

With control over the arrow styles, positions, and colors as well as the ability to define the bullet and thumbnail properties, Smart Slider 3 makes it easy to customize this aspect of your slideshow.

🏞 Slideshow Variations

Truth be told, Divi doesn’t have just one slider module. You can also add post sliders and video sliders to your WordPress website with this theme. These modules make it easy to display a selection of your blog posts in a slideshow format and create sliders that feature videos from external URLs or those you’ve uploaded to your site.

Divi Slider Modules

The Posts Slider module of Divi also gives you the ability to create dynamic slideshows that display the latest post content from your blog. However, Smart Slider 3 goes beyond just allowing you to use posts for the content of your dynamic sliders. Displaying WooCommerce products, custom post types, and content from popular WordPress events plugins as well as the NextGEN Gallery tool is all supported by Smart Slider 3.

Smart Slider 3 Dynamic Sources

You can also display content from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as a range of other sources with Smart Slider 3 Pro. It’s also fair to say that the filtering options of the Smart Slider 3 Pro dynamic slide generator feature are more sophisticated compared to the Divi slider modules.

🎓 Other Ways Smart Slider 3 Upgrades the Divi Slider Tools

Hopefully you now have a better idea of how Smart Slider 3 can upgrade your ability to add slideshow presentations to your Divi website. But if you’re still not sure, how does the idea of being able to create a wider range of slider types, including customizable full-page and full-width sliders, carousels, showcase sliders, and blocks.

Smart Slider 3 definitely isn’t short on fully customizable templates either. Choosing an option from the collection of complete pre-built sliders and library of individual slides can help you save time and overcome any design-related shortcomings you might have.

Smart Slider Templates

Last but not least, Smart Slider 3 compares favorably to other popular premium WordPress slideshow plugins, especially when it comes to performance and ease of use. Image optimization, with the option of enabling lazy loading, is part of the functionality of Smart Slider 3, too.

🤔 Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are plenty of good reasons to use Smart Slider 3 to add sliders to your Divi website. Not only does Smart Slider 3 integrate seamlessly into Divi, but you can build more interesting, creative, and unique slideshows with Smart Slider 3 compared to the Divi slider modules.

It’s worth mentioning that this article isn’t just a case of a plugin developer trying to promote their product over a competitor’s product. If you ask in the Divi Facebook groups and other related communities, you will find instances of people who love Divi but would like the ability to do more with sliders. If you fall into that category, then this article was written for you.

It’s definitely not a case of Divi or Smart Slider 3. Instead, using these two tools together to enhance your options for adding slider to your WordPress website is the way forward.

The post Give the Divi Slider an Upgrade with Smart Slider 3 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

20 Premium WordPress Plugins to Look Out For in 2024

Raelene Morey — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 08:00:22 +0000

Wondering what premium WordPress plugins are worth your time and money? It’s easy to get swept up searching through the 54,000 free plugins available in the WordPress repository. But if you’re looking for a plugin that you can rely on, provides updates and support, and has advanced functionality, it’s worth investing in a premium plugin.

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

Want to jump to a section quickly?

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

Best Visual Builder Premium WordPress Plugins

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

1. Elementor Pro

Get Elementor ProSince its release in 2016, Elementor has quickly grown to become one of the most popular page builders for WordPress, with 5+ million active installs. You can even buy Elementor themes from ThemeForest.

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $49 per year.

2. Smart Slider 3

Get Smart Slider 3If you’re looking for a visual building plugin that lets you design pages and elements for your site without having to replace your whole theme, then Smart Slider 3 is the plugin for you. It’s not just a slider plugin — it’s a powerful visual builder that allows you to create stunning design elements for your WordPress site.

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

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $49.

3. Divi

Get DiviDivi is the most popular page builder for WordPress, according to BuiltWith, though it’s had a lot of time to climb the ranks — it was first released in 2013 as Elegant Themes’s flagship theme.

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $89 per year.

4. JetElements

Get JetElementsIn order to get all possible benefits when it comes to building your own online-project, you cannot pass by this incredible plugin. If you dream of getting your website ready in an effective and easy way, this add-on is exactly what you need. JetElements includes a great number of modules for different purposes. Among them, you can find the following ones:

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $15 at TemplateMonster.

5. Ultimate Blocks

Get Ultimate BlocksIf you are looking for a versatile content marketing plugin to engage web visitors and shoot up conversions, you must try the Ultimate Blocks plugin. This is a Gutenberg block plugin with 20+ feature-rich custom blocks.

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

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

💰 Pricing: It has a free version in the WordPress plugin repository. The price of the premium version starts from $39/year with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Best Security Premium WordPress Plugins

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

6. Sucuri

Get SucuriSucuri is a trusted global leader in website security that specializes in WordPress security. Its free WordPress plugin provides a comprehensive suite of features designed to bolster sites, including activity auditing, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, effective hardening, post-hack security actions, and security notifications.

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $199.99 a year.

7. Defender

Get DefenderDefender is one of those plugins that flies under the radar, which is a shame because it’s a beefy plugin that packs a punch as far as security goes. This plugin has all the features you’d expect of a premium WordPress security plugin and more:

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

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version is included in WPMU DEV’s full toolkit for $49 per month.

8. VaultPress

Get VaultPressVaultPress subscription-based backup and security service developed by the folks at Automattic. It’s now powered by Jetpack, and uses the same Automattic grid that serves over 32 million WordPress.com blogs and 330 million monthly visitors. VaultPress offers automated daily backups with unlimited storage space and a 30-day backup archive. It’s also provides daily in-depth code scans for infiltrations and malware. From your VaultPress dashboard, you can easily restore any of your backups.

💰 Pricing: Jetpack pricing starts at $39 per year.

Best Performance Optimization Premium WordPress Plugins

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

9. WP Rocket

Get WP RocketWP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress thanks to its huge list of features and user-friendly interface. Compared to free plugins like W3 Total Cache, which are confusing to configure, WP Rocket works as soon as you activate it and includes simple settings for further tweaking your site’s performance.

In addition to browser caching, WP Rocket also provides:

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $49 per year

10. WP Smush Pro

Get WP Smush ProWP Smush Pro is the most popular image optimization plugin for WordPress with 1+ million active installations. It works by applying lossless (or lossy) compression techniques to your images that shrink them in size without any noticeable loss in quality.

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version is included in WPMU DEV’s full toolkit for $49 per month.

11. Optimole

Get OptimoleOptimole can be your all-in-one image optimization solution for WordPress. This premium WordPress plugin optimizes your images real-time with a cloud-based system to speed up your website. With the easy-to-setup options you can start improving your site in minutes.

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

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at €19/month.

Best SEO Premium WordPress Plugins

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

12. Yoast SEO

Get Yoast SEOWhen you log in to any WordPress site, more often than not you’ll find Yoast SEO installed. This plugin offers advanced SEO features that are easy enough for beginners to set up and configure.

The premium version of Yoast SEO includes:

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version is $89 per site per year.

Best Ecommerce Premium WordPress Plugins

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

13. WooCommerce

Get WooCommerceWith 4+ million active installs, WooCommerce is the most flexible and customizable ecommerce premium WordPress plugin. You can use WooCommerce to sell both physical and digital products.

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

💰 Pricing: WooCommerce is free, but you’ll need to pay for any premium extensions.

14. WooCommerce Subscriptions

Get WooCommerce SubscriptionsSubscriptions lets you add recurring payments to your WooCommerce store, complete with subscriber management, tracking, and analysis.

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $199 per site per year.

15. PH WooCommerce Deposits

Get PH WooCommerce DepositsThe PH WooCommerce Deposits plugin is an ultimate solution for enhancing payment processes and driving conversions for WooCommerce Store. This powerful tool empowers customers to effortlessly place deposits on products or services, securing their purchases while providing businesses with complete transaction control. Whether you run an online car rental service, a holiday booking platform, or any WooCommerce store dealing with bookings, PH WooCommerce Deposits is tailored to transform your store’s payment landscape. Key Highlights:

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

💰 Pricing: Single Site: $89/year, 5 Sites Bundle: $119/year, 25 Sites: $219/year.

Best Forms and Booking Premium WordPress Plugins

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

16. Ninja Forms

Get Ninja FormsNinja Forms is one of the most popular premium form plugins for WordPress — it’s powerful, flexible and user-friendly. People have decided over 16,000,000 times to download and use this premium plugin. You can build forms with drag & drop within minutes, and it is ideal for beginners, you can use it without coding knowledge. Developers will also find what they need, hundreds of functions, action hooks, filters that they can use to create their own custom functionality.

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

💰 Pricing: There’s a free version available in the WordPress plugin repository. The premium version starts at $99 per site per year.

17. JetFormBuilder

Get JetFormBuilderTransform your WordPress website’s interaction with the innovative JetFormBuilder plugin (more than 430K installations). You can craft personalized forms effortlessly using an array of 19+ form fields, including advanced features like conditional logic, calculated field, and file uploads. Customize every element – fonts, colors, layouts – to align with your vision and brand.

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

💰 Pricing: JetFormBuilder is a free WordPress form plugin. Pro Addons are available if you need to extend functionality (like, Stripe addon, Save form progress, etc.). The cost for Pro addons is $39/year per website.

18. Amelia

Get AmeliaAmelia is an enterprise-level appointment booking Premium WordPress Plugin, built with the newest technology. It can be your automated booking specialist which works 24/7. It provides a smooth booking experience for your customers, take care of the payments, and it will fully automate the interaction with the potential customers.

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

💰 Pricing: Amelia is priced at $59/year.

19. LatePoint

Get LatePointLatePoint is one of the best WordPress appointment plugins and offers a perfect blend of simplicity and advanced functionality. Designed to enhance booking processes, it’s ideal for businesses seeking to streamline their appointment management.

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

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $49 per site per year.

20. SureMembers

Get LatePointSureMembers is an innovative WordPress membership plugin designed for effortless creation and management of membership sites. Its user-friendly setup wizard allows for quick site deployment, perfect for individuals and businesses alike.

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

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

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

💰 Pricing: Pricing starts at $69 per site per year.

Wrapping Up

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

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

Smart Slider 3.3 ‐ Eclipse

Daniel David — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 09:00:47 +0000

The wait is over! We are proud to present our new major version, the Smart Slider 3.3 ‐ Eclipse. This update is a little different from the last two major versions. Mostly because we’ve been listening to your feedback and focusing to improve the performance and the overall experience.

I know that new, spectacular features are always exciting but sometimes what makes everything a little bit better is more important in long term. This update is full of fixes and performance upgrades that should make your experience better, but it also helps us bring you really new exciting features in the next weeks! Let’s have a deeper look at what 3.3 – Eclipse has to offer.

Under the Hood Features

During the previous months, our team were working on a complete re-architecting of our backend system. It was a very time-consuming process but finally we’re ready with most of the heavy lifting.

New Caching System

Smart Slider 3 has always worked from its own cache files. You might have never noticed them, but these cache files helped a lot with your site’s speed. Until version 3.3, these cache files were stored on the server, which caused troubles where there were server configuration issues. Now it’s over! We were eager to find a better solution and our new database caching is exactly this.

Bye Bye XML Files

Previously, all of our parameters were written in XML. But for a more fluid user experience and better flexibility, we’ve got rid of them. You can’t imagine how big this task was, but it was totally worth it. We spent a lot of time tweaking these options but from now the admin is much more transparent.

JavaScript Improvements

Loading is a crucial point for every slider, so we’ve improved this area a lot, too. There is no more conflict with minified files or with the wrong loading sequence. In addition, there is a more robust code which will handle the dependencies and the asynchronous loading without any error. The final result will be a faster and much more stable slider.

New Slide Creation

We’ve redesigned the way you add new slides to your slider, making it easier and faster, so you can create slides more efficiently.

Dynamic Slide Improvements

With the previous major version we released the Content mode which is our all time favorite feature. In this version we’ve changed all dynamic layout from Canvas to Content mode. Even more, we’ve changed the dynamic slide creation a little bit. Now the navigation is crystal clear and simpler to go through the creation steps.

New Features

Let’s wander to the world of the visual representations and leave the mumbo-jumbo behind, because Eclipse has plenty of new feature as well which worth having a look at.

New Slider Templates

Recently we’ve added 3 new beautifully crafted slider templates that give you an easy way to start with Smart Slider. But this is just the beginning, in this year we would like to release new sliders, blocks and pages much more frequently. We have many more slider demos currently being worked on for future updates that will be free for anyone who has an active license. Hey, if you’re a free version user, you will get access to a bunch of free slider templates soon.

New Slider Templates

New Slice Background Animations

So far I haven’t been a big fan of the background animations, but with these new slice animations I think it will change. The slice background animations work with a changeable background color and a simple row slice reveal. It’s a super engaging and modern animation effect that gives you the ability to build a better online presence.

Row and Column Style

Currently our most important goal is to move forward into a visual builder way with Smart Slider 3 which would be a perfect plugin to create any kind of sliders or carousels, but also build a block or even a whole page visually. For this reason, we have to implement a plenty of new options to create a full value visual software. As a first step, we added lots of style related options for the row and column elements with normal and hover state.

New Row and Column Options

Divi Module

After few successful cooperations with other page builders, we finally have access to create our own unique module for Divi. Previously we had the backend module but with Smart Slider 3.3 you can add sliders easily with the visual editor too.

Smart Slider 3 Divi Module

Recent News

June already? Time flies. A lot has happened with us and with our company – and there’s a lot more to come. But now let’s see the two most important pieces of news:

200k Active Installs

We are thrilled to reach 200.000 active installs in the WordPress Directory with the free version of the Smart Slider 3, besides that currently we’re the fastest growing slider plugin. All in all, a huge thanks for your trust and support, this is what makes us grow. We would not have made it without our incredible users who are enthusiastic fans of Smart Slider 3.

Nextend Social Login

Two months ago we re-launched our previously really successful and popular WordPress plugin, the Nextend Social Login. If you’re looking for a good free Facebook or Google login for WordPress, then you will love this lightweight plugin. What’s more, finally we have a little time to create extra, long awaited features which are available in the paid version packed with our super-duper support service.

Nextend Social Login

What’s Coming Next?

We’ve always got our eyes on the future of web design, so 2018 will see us working on lots of awesome features. The hardest part is to choose from our infinite to-do list. But this time the choice is also yours. In the following vote you can select the next big feature and share your opinion!

What should we focus on next? Vote Now!

This update took us longer than expected, but it’s well worth the wait. We’d love to hear your opinions on the latest update so please let us know what you think in the comments below! If you’ve got questions or feedbacks, you can get in touch with us via our contact page or join the conversation in our Facebook Group.

The post Smart Slider 3.3 ‐ Eclipse appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.