Top 5 WordPress Slider Plugins (Free)

WordPress slider plugins can take the photos on your website to the next level.

These plugins are a great way to make your website more appealing and attractive to your visitors with slideshows and sliding photo galleries. Doing this makes the photos on your website more dynamic and lively compared to basic static images. 

There are a ton of different WordPress slider plugins available, but some are far more useful than others.

In this article, we will share our top five picks for the best WordPress slider plugins that are fast, easy to use, and free. 

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What is a WordPress Slider Plugin?

A WordPress slider plugin is a plugin that allows you to add multiple images to your WordPress website and display them as slideshows or a visual sliding gallery. 

Slider plugins allow you to highlight and showcase multiple photos on a single page without taking up too much space or slowing down page load times too much. 

Requirements For Top 5 WordPress Slider Plugins 

In order to limit our list to the top five WordPress slider plugins, we made sure each of the plugins recommended below met a few standards.

All WordPress slider plugins below had to meet the following criteria:

• Have at least 50,000 active installations 
• Been tested with WordPress 5.9 (the most current version of WordPress at the time of publication)
• Have a 4.5-star rating or higher
• Have a minimum of 200 reviews
• Be free to download and use

There are a lot of slider plugins available that don’t meet the above requirements. 

When considering different WordPress slider plugins, we thought it was important that they be up-to-date, widely used, well-reviewed, and free to use.

Best WordPress Slider Plugins

With those basic guidelines in mind, here are our top choices for the best WordPress slider plugins:

Smart Slider 3

It is pretty difficult to earn and maintain a 5-star rating on the WordPress plugin repository, especially for plugins that have gained popularity and are now widely used.

Smart Slider 3 kicks off our list because it has done just that despite more than 800,000 active installations and nearly 1,000 reviews.

This plugin has an easy-to-use interface and pre-built templates that make creating slides fast and simple, and it gives you the freedom to build, edit, and customize your slides the way you want them.  

Smart Slider 3 has too many features to list here, but here are some of the features you will use most:

• Default position: Edit your slides as you would in page builders.
• Absolute position: Drag and drop your layers anywhere on the slide with absolute layers.
• Slide library: Features several pre-made slides to kickstart your work.
• Fully WordPress-integrated: Media manager, shortcode, widget, post permalinks, post editor.
• Mobile-friendly and responsive: Sliders can be enjoyed on any device, be it a mobile, tablet, or desktop.
• Customizable controls: Options include Arrows, Bullets, Autoplay, Bar, Thumbnails, Shadows.
• Slide backgrounds: Nine background animations.
• Layers: Six varied layers including Image, Heading, Text, Button, Vimeo, YouTube.
• Font and Style manager: Customize slider typography and style.
• Template sliders: 14 sliders templates to start.

Of all the WordPress slider plugins available, it is hard to beat the overall functionality of Smart Slider 3.  

MetaSlider

Just behind Smart Slider 3 in active installs is MetaSlider with an impressive 700,000+ installations. 

This plugin keeps things simple by taking care of the technical slider settings for you, which makes creating sliders very easy. 

All you have to do is simply select images and photos, from your WordPress Media Library and then drag and drop them into place. Once you have done that, you can set the slide captions, links, and SEO fields all from one page.

MetaSlider’s top features include:

• Four slider types: slides, slideshows, carousels, and galleries.
• Drag and drop: The intuitive interface makes creating and managing sliders easy. 
• Intelligent image cropping: Crops and resizes your images automatically.
• SEO-friendly: Easily optimize your sliders for SEO.
• Translation support: Compatible with some of the most popular WordPress translation plugins, including WPML, PolyLang & qTranslate.

This slider plugin is super easy to get started with and especially good for beginners who are looking for a quick way to make sliders.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is a 100% responsive and mobile-friendly slider plugin that allows you to create beautiful image and video sliders for your WordPress site in a matter of minutes. 

It features a drag and drop builder and is very user-friendly, which has earned it a 4.5-star rating. 

This plugin is highly optimized for web and server performance, placing a high value on SEO and conversions.

Soliloquy is also optimized for WooCommerce, making it a great choice for those with an online store. 

Top Soliloquy features include:

• Drag and drop builder
• Customizable templates
• SEO-friendly
• Slideshows for featured content
• WooCommerce-optimized
• And more

Soliloquy is a great slider plugin for photographers, designers, and developers alike. 

Master Slider

Master Slider is a responsive, SEO-friendly image and video slider that has amassed more than 100,000 installs and maintained a 4.5-star rating.

This plugin stands out because unlike the others on this list, it supports touch navigation with a pure swipe gesture. It features a drag and drop builder and comes with eight templates that make building slideshows fast and easy. 

Master Slider’s features include:

• Lightweight
• Drag and drop slider creaton
• Super SEO friendly
• Touch swipe navigation
• Eight templates
• Six interactive transitions 
• Smart auto cropping 
• Exclusive widgets and shortcodes
• Smart loading assets

Master Slider was designed using WordPress best practices on both the front and the back end, which makes it a robust and intuitive plugin that works with any theme, including WordPress Default Themes.

RoboGallery

If you looking for a fast, easy plugin with a simple and highly customizable design, RoboGallery is worth checking out. 

It is simple enough that a new user can have a slideshow done in minutes but has enough advanced tools to make it worthwhile for WordPress professionals as well.

It has earned and maintained a 4.5-star rating because it has plenty of tools to offer.  

Let’s take a look at RoboGallery’s top features:

• One click setup
• No right click/content protection for galleries and lightboxes
• No image limits for galleries
• Auto-resizing 
• 15 customizable hover effects
• Font, border, and shadow settings
• Advanced pagination function
• Lazy loading option
• Overlay effects
• Much more

RoboGallery has far more features than listed above, but even those listed make it well worth your time. 

Adding slideshows and sliding galleries to your website is a useful method for managing and displaying images, as well as attracting customers and keeping their attention. 

Thanks to WordPress slider plugins, adding those elements to your website can be done quickly and easily. 

If you want to add any of these WordPress slider plugins to your toolbox, you can find them all on the WordPress plugin repository. 

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