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

Is Hello Theme the Best Theme for Elementor?

Ramona Nemeth-Csoka — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 11:00:37 +0000

Elementor is the most popular page builder for WordPress. It powers more than 5 million WordPress websites all around the world. Due to the nature of WordPress, even the best page builders need a theme as their canvas. For this reason, there are thousands of WordPress themes available to choose from. Now there’s a new challenger in town who wants to be the best theme for Elementor.

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?

Download Hello Elementor ThemeHello Elementor is a minimal and lightweight WordPress theme. Its main purpose is to be fast and work with Elementor as good as possible. When you work with Elementor on Hello theme, you can focus on designing the pages. In fact, you don’t have to worry about the theme getting in the way of your gorgeous design ideas. Since it doesn’t have many features, it doesn’t have much code, which makes it fast. As a result, Hello Elementor might just be the best theme for Elementor.

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.

	Hello Theme	OceanWP	Astra	GeneratePress	Twenty Nineteen
Requests	87	98	87	91	89
Page size	2.1MB	2.3MB	2.1MB	2.1MB	2.1MB
Load time	3.45s	3.85s	3.69s	3.64s	3.58s

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.

	Hello Theme	OceanWP	Astra	GeneratePress	Twenty Nineteen
Requests	42	51	43	45	44
Page size	960KB	1MB	972KB	976KB	985KB
Load time	2.37s	2.70s	2.41s	2.39s	2.43s

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.

	Hello Theme	OceanWP	Astra	GeneratePress	Twenty Nineteen
Requests	61	71	70	64	67
Page size	3.9MB	4MB	4.5MB	4MB	3.7MB
Load time	2.53s	2.88s	2.56s	2.88s	1.83s

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.

	Hello Theme	OceanWP	Astra	GeneratePress	Twenty Nineteen
Requests	54	62	55	57	56
Page size	734KB	829KB	746KB	740KB	759KB
Load time	1.99s	2.26s	2.01s	2.08s	2.11s

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.

	Hello Theme	OceanWP	Astra	GeneratePress	Twenty Nineteen
Requests	47	55	47	49	48
Page size	1.1MB	1.2MB	1.1MB	1.1MB	1.1MB
Load time	2.31s	2.51s	2.36s	2.46s	2.34s

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.

Get Elementor Pro

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.

GeneratePress and Smart Slider 3: The Beginner’s Guide

Klara Kalko — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 07:00:29 +0000

There has been a lot of talk about whether to use a slider or not. So, should you? Despite the fact I rarely use sliders, here’s my answer: if you want to use a slider, use it. Just be aware, your website visitors aren’t going to click with excitement on every slide one-by-one. So don’t fall into the trap of publishing a slider on your homepage simply because your newly purchased multipurpose theme has several demo templates with it.

This is a guest post written by Klara Kalko, who is a freelance blogger at WP Metro. The opinions and ideas expressed herein are author’s own.

Better yet. Don’t use a slider with a multipurpose theme at all. Stick to a basic lightweight theme, such as GeneratePress, one of the best minimal and customizable free WordPress themes (read more about it below). It comes with detailed documentation and tutorial videos, so you will quickly figure out how to set up the theme. In the meantime, your visitors will appreciate the fast website and loading time.

WordPress sliders: consider or avoid?

Definitely an eye candy and an attention catcher, if used right, poorly designed slider along with average-quality content (remember, focus is designer’s best friend) will drive people away at the speed of light. Therefore, experiment, try different placement, show off only the best visual pieces you have. Last but not least, ask yourself what is the purpose of adding a slider and what exactly do you want to achieve with it.

Design is a form of a communication, so if you need a slider to communicate and interact with the visitor / user more effectively, go ahead. In other cases, you will end up using a slider for the sake of having one, which isn’t even an option.

Two things to keep in mind:

the fewer slides you have, the better
use only responsive WordPress slider plugins and always test your sliders on different devices. It saves your time and you won’t have to deal with disappointments.

Back in early 2017, my extremely critical point of view towards sliders came to an end when I discovered Smart Slider 3. It quickly became the only slider I really liked and made an exception for. Obviously, this is also the only standalone slider I recommend and use.

Best minimal and lightweight WordPress themes: GeneratePress

The advantages of using a lightweight WordPress theme (such as a long-time favorite of mine, GeneratePress) instead of a heavy multipurpose one are hard to beat. Serving as a rock solid foundation for any website, GeneratePress delivers impressively fast performance, is responsive and very easy to customize. All theme options are integrated with the native WordPress customizer. It speeds up the theme’s setup and keeps it as simple as possible.

In fact, that was the very first reason I liked GeneratePress so much. The second reason is a modular structure: you can enable or disable theme features depending on your requirements.

In my opinion, every WordPress theme should be built that way.

Again, personal experience: I switched both of my websites to GeneratePress after almost one year of using one of the best multipurpose themes. Never looked back.

GeneratePress Premium Modules Overview

GeneratePress is a 100% free theme, but chances are, within 1 hour of using it you will want a premium modules bundle. GP Premium allows you to customize every part of the theme without adding custom CSS: colors, fonts, menu appearance, blog layout, backgrounds, copyright text and many others. You also get full access to the website templates library, permission to activate your license on unlimited websites and can easily export / import your GP settings.

As a WordPress theme, GeneratePress is a great choice for every category of WordPress users – from beginners to experienced developers: the theme has extensive selections of built-in hooks and filters. There’s only one thing that is just as great as GeneratePress itself – excellent and very helpful customer support (thanks to Tom Usborne, Leo and David Beckwith).

The theme has been chosen. Now let’s take a closer look at Smart Slider 3 and how you can easily design great-looking sliders with it.

Smart Slider 3: first steps

Smart Slider 3 is a really powerful, robust solution that can help you to implement almost any animation-related idea / scenario. Still, every advanced user at some point was a beginner, so let’s start with the basics. Guess what was the first thing I noticed immediately after installing and activating the slider?

The user interface of Smart Slider 3 is just as clean, beautiful and stylish as the sliders you can create with it. Options / settings are intuitive and easy to figure out, every icon seems to have a perfect placement and Smart Slider 3 is simple enough to use, even if you are an absolute beginner.

First things first. Free version of Smart Slider 3 is available on the WordPress plugin repository.

Don’t underestimate the prefix “free”, though – even the free version is packed with many great and quality features.

That alone makes free version of Smart Slider 3 a serious competitor, capable to rival premium sliders. In fact, Smart Slider 3 successfully does just that.

Using Smart Slider 3 with GeneratePress: best features + ways to use

Unlike heavy multipurpose themes, GeneratePress is minimal, lightweight and isn’t bundled with sliders or any additional plugins. For each project, you can choose required plugins on your own. Almost always, people want to have additional visual elements or add more interactivity to make their landing page stand out. Like I said, GeneratePress doesn’t have a built-in slider feature, so here’s what Smart Slider 3 can do for you.

Actually, it’s pretty much my list of favorite features – there are much more.

First and foremost: full integration with WordPress and smooth, bug-free compatibility with GeneratePress. For those who prefer working with page builders, Smart Slider 3 supports Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, SiteOrigin Page Builder and Visual Composer. Free version of Smart Slider 3 allows you to use your blog posts as a dynamic source for the slides.

If you are a designer, illustrator, photographer or filmmaker, Pro version offers something special for you – additional dynamic slide sources: Dribbble, Flickr, YouTube or more generic social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. With Smart Slider 3, you can connect your favorite social network to your website and design the landing page your way – the possibilities are very diversed and flexible.

Even WooCommerce is on the list, so you can design a beautiful landing page for your e-store. Designers and advanced users of Smart Slider 3 can hone their skills by trying to replicate UI / UX design animation. Both versions of Smart Slider 3 allow you to fully customize slider elements: arrows, bullets, thumbnails, slider autoplay and so on. Also, there’s a convenient font management system and integrated Google fonts.

Smart Slider 3 Template Library

Makes me stare. Seriously. Excellent showcase of what you can do with Smart Slider 3 and if you have Smart Slider 3 Pro, you can freely download / customize any of these beautiful templates. 100+ pre-designed slides, 11 of them are free. Filtered by categories, high-quality demo templates with a flawless and clean design will speed up your work.

Guess by now I made it a bit more understandable why Smart Slider 3 Pro is my #1 choice when it comes to sliders. Let’s get more visual.

After installing and activating Smart Slider 3 (same process as with any other WordPress plugin), a new panel will appear in your WordPress dashboard.

Smart Slider 3 in WordPress menu

This is where all the magic happens. When you click on Smart Slider in your WordPress menu, you will be redirected to the dashboard.

Smart Slider 3 settings

There are three menu items:

Dashboard (which is pretty much a homepage of Smart Slider settings / options)
Settings
Help (direct access to detailed Smart Slider 3 documentation, customer support and video tutorials)

Smart Slider 3 Dashboard

General settings and framework settings
I suggest you explore them step-by-step. For now, let’s keep the default ones.

Fonts
This tab allows you to select and configure fonts for your slider. Additional options: enable or disable Google fonts, select font style and character set.

Item defaults
The most extensive and well thought-out tab of Smart Slider 3 settings. Select and set up different elements of your slider.

Generator tabs
Currently, there are 6 social networks you can connect to your WordPress website to create dynamic sliders based on your posted content. Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube. One of the coolest features of Smart Slider 3, it’s also very flexible and useful.

Let’s return to Smart Slider 3 dashboard welcome screen. You have probably noticed the Info center at the top-right corner. Using it, you can check for Smart Slider 3 updates and activate / deactivate your license.

Creating a slider with Smart Slider 3 Pro

Smart Slider 3 dashboard presents three options. You can design a new slider from the scratch, explore templates library to import a demo or check a sample slider.

New slider
After clicking on “Create a New Project” box, new window opens. Here you can choose a name for your slider, set up slider’s width and height per your requirements and select slider’s format.

After selecting a preset, click Create. Now you need to choose content / images for your slider. It’s either your own images, Smart Slider 3 library, a video, your WordPress blog posts or other dynamic sources (Dribble, Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, RSS, Vimeo, YouTube).

Additional options, if you have any of these plugins installed and activated:

All-in-One Event Calendar
Gallery by BestWebSoft
Events Manager
Nextgen Gallery
The Events Calendar
WooCommerce

As the most common source, let’s start with images. Each slide has its own configuration options that appear when you edit slides separately (click on green square plus icon on the left side to access them). There are also a few features for a more convenient, faster and better workflow:

Quick access to general slider settings
Quick access to slides
1-click preview of your slider
Live slider controls and adjustments for mobile devices

It’s quite easy to get carried away with all design possibilities and advanced options of Smart Slider 3. Don’t forget to save your work from time to time.

Single slide settings
To simplify and streamline your work on each slide, Smart Slider 3 equips you with 5 groups of editing tools.

Layer tab
basic tools, content tools, media tools, advanced tools

Structure tab
basic and special layouts

General slider settings

Conclusion

Yoast once published an article named “Sliders suck and should be banned from your website”. Yes, they are respected and famous SEO experts, but I highly doubt this statement. What is 100% true, is that little fact that

“any animation not triggered by the user, can be at best distracting, at worst annoying” (Jules)

Take it as the main rule when you design a slider. Aside from that, sliders don’t suck. Smart Slider 3 proves it.

The post GeneratePress and Smart Slider 3: The Beginner’s Guide appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

The 8 Best Quality WordPress Themes with Sliders

Raelene Morey — Thu, 24 May 2018 19:30:35 +0000

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.

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.

Best Free WordPress Themes with Sliders

Since Smart Slider 3 is free, you might want to pair it with a free WordPress theme:

Neve

Neve is one of the most popular free theme in the WordPress Plugin Directory with 20,000 active installs. It also features a nice, big hero header for displaying images, which is pretty handy if you want to display a hero header slider.

Fortunately, ThemeIsle, the team behind this theme, have put together a handy guide to replacing the “Big Title” section with an image slider. In Smart Slider 3, you just need to copy your slider’s shortcode or PHP code and paste it into Neve’s big_title.php file as instructed.

OceanWP

OceanWP is a free multipurpose WordPress theme that’s easy to adjust for responsive design, ensuring it looks great on any device. There are 13 free demos to choose from, which all feature different layouts.

Adding a hero slider header is as easy as inserting the shortcode for your slider into OceanWP’s settings, which you can learn more about here. Depending on your design, you could display your latest posts as a slider, or stick with a hero slider header.

Here’s just one example of a free slider template from Smart Slider 3 that you could easily insert into your theme and edit to match your branding.

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a fast, lightweight WordPress theme with a modular structure that makes it easy to customize.

Adding a slider to this theme is straightforward. Whether you want to add a homepage slider, testimonial carousel, or post showcase, you can simply add your slider shortcode into the “Content” section of the page header metabox (if you’re using the Page Header add-on).

Otherwise, if your homepage is your blog, you can go to Appearance > Blog Page Header and insert your slider shortcode into the content section of that page (also using the Page Header add-on). You can learn more here.

Astra

For a free theme, Astra is gorgeous – the team who built it obviously have an eye for design.

Astra works great with the Elementor page builder plugin, which allows you to customize your pages via drag and drop. With Elementor, you can add sliders anywhere on your site by inserting your slider shortcode into your theme. WPCrafter.com explains how to work with Astra’s headers using Elementor in this instructional video.

Startup Blog

The Startup Blog theme is a beautiful, minimalist WordPress theme you can get for free. It features a nice looking post slider at the top of the page, immediately encouraging visitors to check them out. Since it’s a free theme, it doesn’t have a built-in page builder. But the good news is, Startup Blog plays very well with Elementor. Did you know that at the moment Elementor has more than 3 million active installations? It’s safe to say this is the most popular free page builder plugin in 2019. By the way, the theme is also Gutenberg compatible.

Startup Blog isn’t just Elementor and Gutenberg but Smart Slider 3 friendly as well. You can put the slider’s shortcode to any post or page and the slider will show up there. If you would like to replace the header slider with Smart Slider 3, you’ll need to modify the theme. But the developers coded Startup Blog so well that this will be very easy.

Need help to get started? Startup blog theme has a very detailed documentation. It teaches you everything from the basics to the more advanced settings. All steps are explained in detail, with pictures. Thanks to this, you’ll be able to set up this beautiful theme in no time!

Best Premium WordPress Themes with Sliders

When you’re ready to take your website to the next level, a premium theme can provide you even more features. Here’s a select list of themes that work great with WordPress sliders.

Avada

As I mentioned above, Avada is the best-selling WordPress theme in the ThemeForest marketplace with 425k+ sales. It comes bundled with 3 premium sliders – Layer Slider, Slider Revolution, and Fusion Slider. But again, when you use one of these plugins it means you’ll only get a limited feature set, no support, and you won’t be able to update the plugin..

With Smart Slider 3, you can easily add a slider to any page or post using the theme’s Fusion Page Options or Fusion Builder Elements. For example, say you wanted to add a static slider to the Avada theme using Smart Slider 3. You could easily insert the free template slider below – or any one of Smart Sliders 100+ templates – using Fusion’s features and make further customizations to suit the style of your site.

BeTheme

With more than 330 pre-built templates, BeTheme is a hugely popular option for users who want to build a stunning WordPress site with ease. Like other popular premium WordPress themes, it comes with page building functionality – Muffin Builder 3 and WPBakery Page Builder.

With these page building tools, all you need to do is insert your slider shortcode into any post or page to display a beautiful slider, whether it’s a product slider like this:

X Theme

With X Theme, you can achieve virtually any look and layout for your website using one of the 4 pre-built “stacks” (i.e. starter themes), which you can then customize using Cornerstone. The team behind X Theme developed the Cornerstone page builder to give users the freedom and flexibility to make front-end customizations and create any design you want.

X Theme comes bundled with Slider Revolution, LayerSlider, and Soliloquy. Again, with a free standalone plugin such as Smart Slider 3 you’ll get full slider functionality. Just like the other slider plugins, all you need to do is copy your shortcode from Smart Slider 3 and, using Cornerstone, paste it on your site where you want to display your slider/s.

For example, say you wanted to add a slider section to the band theme demo above. With Smart Slider 3 you could create a section displaying your latest posts, like so:

Conclusion

When it comes to WordPress themes with sliders, your choices are endless. The truth is, you don’t need to download or buy a theme with a “built-in slider” because there’s no such thing – themes with sliders use third-party plugins in order to provide that functionality.

So why not cut out the middleman and download a free slider that’s better than any bundled slider plugin? Smart Slider 3 can help you create any kind of slider you want, from homepage hero sliders to testimonial carousel, post showcases, fullscreen sliders, and even simple hero blocks. You’re only limited by your imagination.

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