Having a website is an essential ingredient to your success.

Not only does having a website give you that competitive edge, but it also offers you a platform to show off your photography skills.

Plus, what photographer doesn’t have their own website?

We get it. You’re a pro when it comes to aspect ratio, aperture, burst mode, depth of field, and other photographic terms. But, when it comes to WordPress, plugins, themes, user experience, and sliders, you may not be quite so confident.

Guess what? Building a photography website is way easier than you might imagine!

By the end of this article, you’ll be a pro at creating photography websites as well. And you never know. You just might add a new skill to your repertoire!

Ready to build a photography website? Let’s dive in!

How to Build a Photography Website in 12 Simple Steps

We’ve laid it all out to make the website building process really simple. From the planning stage to building and maintaining your website, it’s all here in this guide.

Step #1: Set Clear Goals

What is the purpose of your website? Is it to show off your photography? Is it to land a new client or freelance jobs? Are you planning to sell your photographs online?

By having a clear goal, you will be better positioned to plan your website development. You’ll know whether you just need a landing page, a full business website, a website plus online store, or an online portfolio.

If you’re planning to feature an online store, you can plan which payment and shipping providers to use as well.

The best way to go about doing this is by looking at competitor websites. While you needn’t copy their entire structure, you could take inspiration and judge what’s working and what’s not.

Then you can come up with a plan to do better!

Step #2: Arrange Your Best Photographs by Theme

An important point to consider while setting your website goals is to categorize your photographs by theme.

You may have photos of weddings, product launches, nature, wildlife, festivals, exhibitions, and more.

Instead of dumping all your photos into a generic gallery, categorizing your photos makes for a better user experience.

It also helps users navigate to exactly what they want to see.

While we’re on this topic of arranging your photographs by theme, it would make sense to have your images optimized and set to a specific size.

High-resolution images, especially with complex backgrounds are great to see, no two ways about that. But they take up a lot of space and can slow your website. A background remover for photographers could slightly ease the problem by simplifying your images, all while keeping them high-quality.

Nobody wants a slow website!

Optimizing your photos overcomes that challenge. Photo editors such as Adobe Photoshop do a great job of optimizing your images for the web.

If you’re using WordPress, you can also install plugins such as Smush, which optimizes your images without affecting the photo quality.

We recommend using both methods for maximum impact!

Step #3: Build Your Platform

Now that we’re clear on our website goals and have our photographs in place, it’s time to build our photography website.

A search on Google for web platforms will throw up several results. From Wix to Squarespace, you’ve genuinely got a lot of options to build your website.

While all these options are plentiful and beginner-friendly, we recommend an option that drives more than 42% of the websites worldwide. WordPress (that’s wordpress.org)!

WordPress offers unmatched customization and flexibility that no other platform offers. While there’s a slight learning curve, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how simple and easy it is to create a website using WordPress.

Not to mention, if you want to add extra functionality to your website, you could do so easily by using a WordPress plugin.

Want to start selling photographs on your website? Install the WooCommerce plugin.
Want to easily add your portfolio across your website? Install the WP Portfolio plugin.

All this without being tied to a subscription plan, which is not the case with some other popular website builders!

To get started with building a website using WordPress, all you need is to purchase a domain and hosting. A way to ensure your creative business really stands out from the crowd is with a .studio domain, which can help create a solid connection in the minds of your customers.

While selecting a web host, look for one that offers specific WordPress hosting. It helps you get started with WordPress immediately, without having to go through the installation process.

Everything will be installed and set up for you. All you’ll need to do is add a theme, some plugins and your content.

Step #4: Choose the Perfect WordPress Theme

Once you have installed WordPress or bought hosting with it already installed, you now need to install a theme.

A WordPress theme provides the look and feel of your website. The colors, typography, design, and layout, all are part of your theme.

While it’s natural to get carried away with the many beautifully designed themes on the market, we recommend you spend some time evaluating them for more than just looks.

After all, your website’s performance and speed are also dependent on the WordPress theme you select.

We’ve made this decision easy for you. Install the Astra theme.

Astra is a hugely popular WordPress theme that has been installed on more than a million websites. Websites built using the Astra theme load super fast, are mobile responsive, and search engine friendly.

Their library of 180+ professionally designed Starter Templates offers a pre-built website demo for just about any niche or industry.

Using their one-click import feature, you can import a Starter Template and have your photography website ready in a matter of minutes.

All you have to do is add the actual content, and you are good to go live!

The Astra theme can be customized just the way you want. Use your favorite page builder or even the Gutenberg block editor to customize your pages.

We’ve got an in-depth article on how you can build your website using the Astra theme and Smart Slider 3 to help you.

Step #5: Include the Right Pages

As you’ve planned your website’s goals early on, this step should be easy.

If you are creating a portfolio website, the typical pages can be home page, about, portfolio, gallery, blog, and contact. If you are including an online store, then you may have the shop page as well.

Irrespective of the pages you create, we recommend you add a personal touch. Feature yourself on the website and let your audience connect to the person behind those fantastic photographs.

This definitely helps land new clients!

Creating web pages is pretty straightforward. It’s all the more manageable if you’ve installed an Astra Starter Template. All the pages are done for you, and you’ve just got to add the actual content.

Another way to stand out from the crowd is to install the WordPress Smart Slider 3 plugin.

Smart Slider 3 is a powerful WordPress plugin used to create sliders effortlessly. The sliders are fully responsive, optimized for search engines, and work with just about any WordPress theme.

Once you’ve installed the Smart Slider 3 plugin, you can create stunning pages that showcase your work in great-looking slideshows anywhere on your website.

Whether it’s adding a slider on a page or creating an entire page using a range of templates, the Smart Slider 3 plugin makes creating pages super easy.

We recommend using a slider on your home page above the fold. You could also create smaller sliders on category pages or your store page too. Smart Slider 3 makes it easy.

Using the drag-and-drop builder, you can customize the template just the way you want.

Step #6: How to Create a Portfolio Page

Next comes the most crucial page of our photography website, the portfolio page. After all, the primary purpose of creating a photography website is to display our portfolio, right?

One way to go about adding a portfolio page is by using the WP Portfolio plugin.

Using the WP Portfolio Plugin

WP Portfolio is a simple yet powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create some fantastic portfolio pages. It’s developed by the same team behind the very popular Astra theme and several other world-class products.

Once you install the plugin, you can either showcase a set of pre-built website templates on your website or add your own photographs as part of your portfolio.

WP Portfolio uses shortcodes. Once you have created a portfolio or two, you can embed them anywhere on your site using those shortcodes.

Just copy the individual shortcode for the gallery and place it within a Gutenberg block or page builder block.

Easy!

Using Portfolio Categories Template Slider

Another way to add a portfolio page is by using our Smart Slider 3 plugin.

When you install our plugin, you have access to some well-designed templates. One such template is the portfolio page.

It’s completely done for you. All you’ve to do is customize it to fit into your overall design.

Step #7: Add Photos and Content

We’ve got most of our pages in place. We have to add the actual content and photos, and we should be almost good to go.

A picture is worth a thousand words. You’ve undoubtedly heard this before.

As tempting as it can be to add a lot of written content to your pages, we recommend you not go overboard and let your photographs do the talking.

Add just enough to tell the story or set the scene and then leave your images to work their magic.

Adding a blog to your photography website? You can write all you want there!

Step #8: Connect to Social Media

Social media is a great way to engage with your audience. Based on your niche, some networks may drive more engagement than others.

For instance, platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are great for displaying your photographs and portfolio. These platforms are more visual and are great for your niche.

Did you know that there are over 500 million users on Instagram daily and approximately 454 million users monthly on Pinterest?

By including your website link on your profile bio, you could leverage some of that traffic.

Common places to display your social media icons are on the website header, footer, side navigation, or on a sticky bar that can appear anywhere on your website.

Popular social network WordPress plugins include Social Media Share Buttons and Social Sharing Plugin – Sassy Social Share, among many others.

Login via Social Media Account

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Want to allow users to log in using their social media accounts?

Social logins allow you to offer an alternative for your users to log in instead of using an email address. It’s an innovative method to build a community quickly.

Visitors can register using their social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Nextend Social Login is one such free plugin that easily allows you to add social login. In addition to your WordPress login, Nextend Social Login seamlessly integrates with the various registration forms on your website.

Step #9: Optimize Your Photography Website’s SEO

Recall us recommending you add just enough content to tell the story on your website? Well, here’s why.

Understandably, your photography website is going to be all about the images. While it’s excellent to see pictures, that doesn’t go well with search engines.

Search engines look out for keywords within your content to index your pages and cannot understand images (yet). Without written content, the search engines will struggle to understand, and therefore, rank your website.

While you can add some content to your pages, you should also consider optimizing your images to rank better in Google images.

Start by naming your photographs appropriately. A random image name, such as ‘img234568.jpg’ doesn’t do as much justice as what ‘holiday-at-maldives.jpg’ would do.

Additionally, including the alt-text and description of the images goes a long way in getting found on Google images.

Step #10: Optimize for Mobile Devices

More than half the traffic on a website is from mobile devices and that’s increasing all the time.

This only reinforces the fact that your photography website has to be responsive and fully optimized for mobile devices.

Fortunately, the heavy lifting is done for you when you build a website using the Astra theme and our Smart Slider 3 plugin.

Both are fully responsive and will ensure your website works properly on any device.

Step #11: Ask for Feedback

Ready to make your site live? How about asking for some feedback first?

Share your website URL with friends, family, or colleagues and ask them for feedback. You’ll be surprised by the feedback they could come back with. It’s like having an in-house QA (quality assurance) team!

Take it from us, when you spend hours, days, or weeks working on a website design, you’ll be amazed at what you miss!

Having people you trust provide feedback is incredibly useful.

Be it typos, images not loading properly on a specific browser, an unresponsive call to action, or any other issue, knowing ahead of go-live can really save your blushes!

You never know. You may just land up with some pre-launch inquiries too!

Step #12: Keep Your Site Updated

Congratulations, your website is ready to go live!

Pat yourself on the back to remind yourself that your work is only half done.

On a more serious note, while building your website was important, maintaining it is equally important.

Whether it’s regular content updates, adding new photographs, updating your plugins and themes, running a website is a continuous process. And one that we feel you’ll love doing!
Conclusion
Having a website is more a necessity than an option. It’s all part of building an online brand and getting your name and your work out there.

Whether it’s to showcase your portfolio, create an online profile, land a new job or even get new clients, building a portfolio website is a must-have tool to beat the competition.

Fortunately, building a portfolio website to showcase your photography skills is simple with the range of tools and resources available. With tools such as WordPress and Smart Slider, creating stunning pages has never been easier!

The post How to Build a Photography Website: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

Meet Hello Theme, Elementor’s first theme. Since they know Elementor better than anyone else, they could create a theme that lets the user make the most of it. As a result, they created a theme that lets you build beautiful websites using Elementor. Additionally, the theme you use won’t get into your design’s way anymore. In fact, they claim this is the best theme for Elementor. Is that true? Let’s find out!

What is Hello Elementor theme?

What are the best themes for Elementor?

Elementor works with any WordPress theme you can find. Despite this, there are three best themes for Elementor which developers love to use the most. The themes people particularly love are: Astra, OceanWP, and GeneratePress. Not only they’re free themes, but they also power over 800.000 WordPress sites. Hello Elementor is here to challenge these super popular themes. It has a single goal, to be the best theme for Elementor while being the fastest one as well.

What do you need to know about Hello Elementor theme?

Hello Elementor is a clean and simple WordPress theme. As a result, it doesn’t offer many styling options. But that’s not a problem, because you can use Elementor to design every aspect of your website. As a matter of fact, without Elementor, you can only style your pages with custom CSS. For instance, there’s only one menu, but it has no styling. With Elementor Pro you can easily overcome this problem, though.

Although WordPress traditionally has sidebars, Hello Elementor doesn’t have any. If your layout relies on sidebars, Hello Elementor might not be the best theme for Elementor for you. However, you can install a plugin that lets you create sidebars if that’s what you need. Using Elementor’s Sidebar Widget, you can place these sidebars on any page.

While it works fine with the free version, at the end of the day, Hello Elementor feels like a theme for Elementor Pro. For instance, you can’t style the header menu at all without the Pro, unless you do custom coding. However, many people who use Elementor don’t want or don’t know how to do that. There’s nothing wrong with creating a theme for Elementor Pro, of course. But it might have been better to call Hello Elementor what it actually is: a theme for Elementor Pro.

How easy is it to switch to Hello Elementor from a different theme?

Hello Elementor is a lightweight theme, designed to be the best theme for Elementor. Because of this, it makes many people think about abandoning their current theme for its sake. You can switch to Hello Elementor the same way as you’d switch to any other theme. In other words, you need to check the new theme in a testing environment first.

It’s important to realize that Hello Elementor is only a blank canvas you can work with. It’s different from the other popular Elementor themes. Due to the fact that these themes offer more features without the need of Elementor. So you need to be ready to make some heavy changes to keep the look and feel of your site after the theme changes. As a result, you’ll get a simpler and much faster loading website.

Is Hello Elementor a worthy challenger for “the best theme for Elementor” title?

Hello Elementor’s main purpose is to give a blank canvas for Elementor page builder. As I’ve mentioned before, the same team is behind the Elementor and Hello Elementor. Hence you can expect the theme to remain compatible with Elementor for years to come. With this in mind it worth giving Hello Elementor a chance for your next project. As a result, you can reduce the possibility of a conflict between your theme and page builder. If that’s not a good reason to say Hello Elementor is the best theme for Elementor, I’m not sure what is.

Elementor is the most popular page builder plugin. Because of that, there are many other plugins extending it with extra functionality. For instance, there’s a plugin that adds post grid to Elementor. The theme is not only compatible with Elementor, but it also works with these plugins. So if you plan to use any of these plugins, feel confident that the theme won’t cause you trouble.

Is Hello theme the fastest Elementor theme?

You can’t tell how fast a theme is without actually testing it. To find out how fast Hello Elementor is, I’ve imported five Elementor demo templates. Then I loaded each page using Hello Elementor, OceanWP, Astra and GeneratePress. To make the text more interesting, I also added Twenty Nineteen to the mix.

I ran the tests on the same website, with no other plugins but Elementor Free. The only exception is OceanWP, where I also installed and activated Ocean Extra. The server I ran the tests on runs PHP 7.2.16. There wasn’t any caching either on server side or via a plugin. The internet speed was 10Mbit/s for each test. These are the results for each template.

Homepage – Restaurant

Elementor’s Homepage Restaurant demo was my first choice for the speed comparison. To begin with, it has lots of images and a couple of fancy effects, which makes it perfect for measuring speed. As you can see from the table below, Hello Elementor managed to outperform the four other themes. The second fastest was Twenty Nineteen, which might be a little bit surprising. GeneratePress finished in third place with four extra requests compared to Hello Elementor.

Homepage – Fitness

Homepage Fitness is a bit more lightweight template than the Restaurant one. Because of this, it’s perfect for a fast loading landing page. It’s not surprising that Hello Elementor was the fastest to load this page as well. GeneratePress and Astra earned the second and third place respectively.

Landing Page – Vacation

Header background videos are popular design choices on many websites. For this reason, it makes sense to test a template which is a similar design choice. Landing Page Vacation is a cool template which has a background video in its hero header. This time, Twenty Nineteen loaded the template the fastest. Hello Elementor was the second fastest, closely followed by Astra.

Homepage – Agency

After testing a template with a video hero, I wanted to check a less content heavy template again. I’ve chosen Homepage Agency because of its modern look and few, but reasonable number of images. The results are quite similar to what we have got before. Hello Elementor is the first, Astra is the second and GeneratePress is the third.

Product – App

Product App template has very few images. As a result, it helps to get a better look at the actual speed of the theme. The speed test results aren’t so surprising. Hello Elementor is the fastest theme. The close second is Twenty Nineteen which managed to be faster than Astra by 0.02s.

Speed result conclusion

Based on my tests, Hello Elementor is indeed the fastest theme for Elementor. Twenty Nineteen, another rather basic theme was the only one that could beat it. In the light of the results, it’s safe to say Hello Elementor is a great choice for any website. As a matter of fact, it might just be the best theme for Elementor.

Where could Hello Elementor improve to be the best theme for Elementor?

Hello Elementor is a minimal theme, which lets you design your whole site using Elementor. As a result, there are some significant disadvantages, which future updates might solve. Here’s a list of features I’m missing from Hello Elementor the most:

• Global styling options. See, when you download a standalone theme, it has some basic styling. For instance, it sets font sizes, colors, line height and so for texts and headings. Hello Elementor lacks these features. Of course, you can always fix this via custom coding, but it would be nice not to have to do that.
• Removing the page title. Not all pages need to have a visible title. This is especially true when you can’t even style them without custom coding. Because of that, an option would be nice to remove the title from the specific page. Currently, you can only hide it, but that happens with CSS. Additionally, the h1 tag stays there, which can make it difficult for you to do proper SEO. However, if you switch to canvas page template, you can get rid of the page title. But you’ll need to say goodbye to your header and footer, because it doesn’t support them.
• Better usage of Customizer. All themes must be Customizer ready to be a part of WordPress.org’s theme collection. Because of that Hello Elementor uses Customizer, too. With this in mind, it would be great to have a couple of options here, such as some global styling, mentioned above.

In any case, Hello Elementor is a great theme, perhaps the best theme for Elementor. But it would be great to see either of these features in a future release. In the meantime, Hello Elementor remains your average, but speedy minimal WordPress theme.

How can you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor and Hello Elementor?

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated WordPress slider plugin. Moreover, it’s fully compatible with Elementor. As a result, you can add the sliders you created to Elementor using a special Smart Slider 3 widget. Since Hello Elementor relies on the page builder, Smart Slider 3 works with it as well. In case you haven’t used Smart Slider 3 yet, here’s a quick video that shows you how easy it is to display your slider.

Smart Slider 3 is a great choice to create beautiful sliders, especially, if you don’t have Elementor Pro. Even if you do have it, Smart Slider 3 has much more features compared to Elementor’s own solution. For instance, you can create gorgeous dynamic post sliders, even with the Free version.

Conclusion

Choosing a WordPress theme isn’t easy as there are so many themes to choose from. The final choice always depends on the project’s requirements and personal preferences. With this in mind, Hello Elementor is a great starter theme. It indeed suits well for most Elementor websites. In case it doesn’t suit yours, you can choose from the three most popular Elementor themes from above. They’re great, just like Hello Elementor, although maybe not as fast.

The post Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

In this article I will show you how you can build your website with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3.

About Astra

Astra is a very simple and customizable theme in which you can customize your own content. This theme has simple editing options. The Theme is available for free at WordPress.org and it has wide-ranging popularity. It has 1+ million active installs and 5/5 stars rating.

So you can trust it!

Astra is made for page builders, therefore you can customize it without a coding knowledge. You can change the design in the WordPress Customizer. Besides that it offers you ready to import websites. You should just install the Starter Templates plugin to get the beautiful layouts.

Using the Astra Theme is very extensive. You can use it for your blog or you can make an eCommerce, a small agency or a business website. You can change everything in the Theme, and can reach the result what you imagined.

It is important mention that Astra is made for speed. And this isn’t just a “marketing trick”, this is a real fact what the Theme promises. But I will write about that later.

Has the Astra Theme slider tool? Unfortunately not, and I miss it. Slider makes your site more expressive, but you can use the Smart Slider 3 plugin, and you can easily put it into your theme. So if you want to build a website using free tools, Smart Slider 3 with Astra Theme provides you a great option.

How about page builders?

Page builders are very populated in WordPress. You should just imagine what you want, and with simple drag and drop your website is ready. But a page builder can’t work well without a good theme. A theme should be optimized to be highly compatible for page builders.

Astra offers different solutions with which you can be sure that your website will look exactly how you imagined it. It gives you more space to focus on design. At the post and pages you can disable the header, title or the footer. You can switch a layout inside a post/page, and you can choose a sidebar option as well.

So Astra lets you customize every setting on every page, so you can simply personalize your website. You can focus on the content. There aren’t places what you can’t change with a page builder, if there is something, you can easily switch that off.

How about sliders?

Nowadays I can’t imagine a website without a hero image, and a slider is an extended version of that. In a slider there are multiple versions of your hero images which you can make your site even more professional with.

Sliders are particularly good design tools which allow images, videos and other content like CTA buttons. The content can be expressive and maximizes the space on your website as well.

When a person visits your website, it makes a good impression on them if your site:

• is easy to read,
• simple,
• clear,
• and good-designed.

And sliders can add these conditions for your website.

The new way to build a Slider

Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.

Get Started

Tutorial: Astra Theme with Smart Slider 3 – Website in 1 Hour

Import a template from Starter Templates

In Astra there are a lot of free and premium ready to import websites. You should download just the Starter Templates plugin and you can choose which page builder you are using: Elementor, Beaver Builder, Gutenberg or Brizy.

Using these templates is a good choice, they look gorgeous, modern and can be imported easily. Some of the templates are only available in paid version, but there are a lot for free ones.
You can preview them and by 2 clicking you can import what you want.

First you should install the plugins which are in your chosen template. Finally you can import the site.

Import a slider from the Template Library

You have a ready template now and you need just a slider to the top. You can use slider easily in Astra Theme, and if you want to be ready fast, Smart Slider 3 has a Template Library as well. And you can import a slider from there.

In the Slider Library there are a lot of premium and free sliders, now I will import a free one.

After that you can customize your slider and you can put it into your Astra Theme. Adding to Astra Theme slider is very simple with your favorite page builder. You should just use the Smart Slider 3 widget, and you have a slider in your site now!

If you would like to learn about how you can publish Smart Slider 3, watch our video:

It took about 5 minutes to have a ready template on your site considering that you have looked around on the Astra Site and knew which Astra template you would use. Importing a slider and putting it in your template is not more than 5 minutes. So you have 50 Minutes yet if you would like to finish your page in one hour.

Now you should just personalize your content. Very fast, very simple and you can enjoy building a website.

Creating in Astra Theme slider for the heading part

With Astra Theme you can even make a custom header with Smart Slider 3. This is also simple, you can choose a widget type for header in the Customizing → Header → Primary menu.

Then in your Customizing menu → Widgets you can set the Smart Slider 3 widget.

You should just choose which slider would you like to display. And now you have a header on all of your pages with your slider.

But there are more options to apply your Astra Theme slider, first of all you can download the Astra Hooks plugin. With this plugin you can paste a shortcode fast everywhere on your page.

You should just copy and paste your sliders’ shortcode into a place where you want to display it.

So I can tell you there are a lot of options to make your own website.

I wrote about only the free version of Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3. With the paid version of them I can’t imagine limits by building a site.

How about speed?

The speed of your webpage is the most important thing what you have to consider. People don’t have lots of time to wait loading your site, so it should be fast. It depends on a lot of factors, but choosing a good Theme and a fast hosting can be the solution.

Astra loads only about 0.5 second. That is usually short, because most homepages load about 1MB. It is optimized for speed, and needs only 50 KB of resources to load. It doesn’t use jQuery, instead of that it uses Vanilla. And Astra Theme gets high ratings in all page speed test tools.

Smart Slider 3 only loads after everything else has finished loading on your website to be able to calculate the positions where everything should be. Normally it doesn’t take lots of time, but if you uploaded a high quality picture it can be slower. So most of the speed depends on the used rich media. But in Smart Slider 3 you have the opportunity to optimize your slider.

Smart Slider 3 offers a lot of speed settings for you in the Pro version.

What can you do to optimize your slider?

• Choose the correct image size: Use images where the dimensions are close to your slider size!
• Use device specific images: You can use device specific images what can be easily set, also you can optimize your images even better.
• Reduce the number of slides: Don’t use too many slides on your page! Furthermore you can display your images randomly. This is also an option in Smart Slider 3.
• Use the Smart Slider 3 image resizing feature: The Optimize tab → Layer image resize and Background image resize options can be really useful. They will resize the images to the sliders size automatically.
• Use the lazy loading: With this feature you can set up that a certain number of images load.

So Smart Slider 3 in Astra Theme takes care of your problems with the speed.

Final Thoughts

I can recommend Astra Theme to everybody who starts building a website now and doesn’t know which Theme to choose. It loads fast, it is clean and you can fully customize it. And it works fine with Smart Slider 3, hence you can take your site more professional.

Astra is a great decision if you like to use page builders, and Smart Slider 3 is the best choice to use a slider in your Astra Theme. With this Theme and with this plugin you can save a lot of time.

The post Build Your Website Easily with Astra Theme and Smart Slider 3 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/wordpress-themes-with-sliders/ Thu, 24 May 2018 19:30:35 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=7876 Strong imagery is a must for any website, but even more so if you have a commercial need to promote your work or sell your products online. One of the best ways to showcase your images is using WordPress themes with sliders. WordPress themes that integrate with sliders – and vice versa – provide an […]

The post The 8 Best Quality WordPress Themes with Sliders appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Strong imagery is a must for any website, but even more so if you have a commercial need to promote your work or sell your products online. One of the best ways to showcase your images is using WordPress themes with sliders.

WordPress themes that integrate with sliders – and vice versa – provide an ideal way to display multiple images fluidly and in an eye-catching way that grabs your visitors’ attention the moment they land on your site.

But before you go downloading that theme you like with its shiny built-in slider, there are a few things you need to know first…

The Problem with Bundled Slider Plugins

What you might not know is that themes that offer slider functionality usually provide it via a third-party plugin. Here’s how it works:

• The theme author buys an extended license for a slider plugin from a plugin developer, and
• This extended license allows the theme author to include the slider with a theme they sell.

A popular example of this is Slider Revolution, which is by far the most popular slider plugin for WordPress. How did it get so popular? It is bundled with hundreds of themes in the hugely popular ThemeForest marketplace, including Avada, the best-selling theme of all time on the site.

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You might be thinking, bundling plugins with themes makes sense. After all, if a theme author designs a theme to include a hero slider header, they should provide the functionality to achieve it. Plus, bundling plugins makes it easier for users to get a site up and running quickly since they don’t have to buy additional plugins to use with the theme.

Yes, it does make sense. But it’s important to be aware of a few traps. Specifically:

• Bundled slider plugins can only be used under the same license as the theme they came with, i.e. you can’t use the slider plugin with a different theme;
• If you need help using the slider plugin, you’ll need to get in touch with the theme author you purchased from during your support period – you can’t access support directly from the slider plugin developer; and
• Bundled plugins can only be updated when a new version of the theme they are attached to is released. Unless you buy the slider plugin separately, you’ll have to wait until the author of the theme provides the latest version of the bundled plugin with their next theme update.

When users purchase a theme bundled with a slider plugin and later realize the plugin they thought they had also purchased is completely useless with other themes, well… let’s just say it’s caused confusion and later frustration amongst ThemeForest customers:

Look, I’m not out to bash Slider Revolution here. I think it’s a fantastic plugin. It’s just unfortunate that the licensing around bundled plugins – especially themes bundled with slider plugins – is confusing. Users aren’t getting what they thought they paid for.

Which is why I think the solution is to use standalone plugins.

Why Standalone Plugins Are Best

A standalone plugin is a plugin that you download or buy on its own, i.e. it doesn’t come bundled with another product. You can download standalone plugins from the official WordPress Plugin Directory and from marketplaces like CodeCanyon (which is part of the Envato company umbrella that ThemeForest also falls under).

When you download a standalone plugin, you get all the benefits of a regular license, including:

• You can use the plugin independently with any theme;
• You can update the plugin whenever there are new updates available from the developer – you don’t need to wait until your theme can be updated; and
• You get access to support.

If you’re launching a new website or planning a redesign and know that you’ll need a slider, it’s best to download or buy it separately from a trusted slider developer. This way, you’ll know that the plugin will work with any theme and if you need support you can count on a quick response from the very people who built it.

Smart Slider 3: The Highest Rated Slider Plugin for WordPress

When it comes to slider plugins, yes, Slider Revolution is the most popular premium option. But did you know Smart Slider 3 is the highest-rated slider plugin for WordPress? With 430 five-star reviews and 200,000 active installs recorded in the WordPress Plugin Directory, you can’t go wrong. Plus, it’s free to download.

There’s a pro version of the plugin, which I’ve compared with Slider Revolution here. But really, the free version is all you need to get started adding a beautiful slider to your website.

Let’s take a look at themes that integrate nicely with Smart Slider 3, along with ideas for how you can feature sliders in your theme.

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