One of the best things about WordPress is the degree to which it can be customized and made to present your content in the most attractive way possible.
One way to beautify your website or blog is by using a slider. A slider or slideshow can bring attention to your content by presenting gorgeous images in combination with links to posts or articles.
However, the problem with sliders is that they can increase the load time of your page or affect the performance of your site negatively. This depends on different factors such as:
- The capability of your server to handle the load of a slideshow.
- Whether your visitors have fast internet connections.
- If your images are high resolution or not.
- The capability of visitor’s devices to handle the load of scripts controlling a slider.
Another thing to consider is whether your website is mobile responsive or not, and whether the slider plugin you are using is also mobile responsive. If not, the slideshow might display incorrectly on mobile devices, ruining the experience of visitors to your website.
There are several plugins you can use to create a slideshow for your website. Some have faster response times than others, and some are mobile responsive. Some are free, while some need to be purchased.
Here are some of the most popular free image slider for WordPress plugins available:
Soliloquy Lite
The paid service Soliloquy has a free plugin, called Soliloquy Lite. It has an impressive tagline: “The best responsive WordPress slider plugin. Period.”
Based on user feedback, it seems to be living up to the hype, minimizing lag and page load time.
To set up the slider, you have to add images, select your slider’s size and speed, and then click “Publish”. The generated code is then copied then pasted into your WordPress site.
Soliloquy Lite is mobile responsive, has media buttons, has touch swipe support for touch-enabled devices, allows the use of the same image for multiple sliders, and has the ability to crop images.
Nivo Slider
Nivo Slider is another free tool that can be used to place sliders in your website. It does not support videos and multimedia—only images can be placed in Nivo Slider.
To create a slider using Nivo Slider, you can use its media uploader to choose several images for inclusion. Using the uploader, you can also create captions, place links, and add alternate text to the slide images.
It also has a unique selling point. According to Nivo Slider, it is world renowned as the most beautiful and easy to use image on the market.
Meteor Slides
Unfortunately, Meteor Slides is more time consuming than its counterparts, as it does not allow images to be mass selected, but instead have to be uploaded one-by-one.
LenSlider
Considering that LenSlider is free, it has a respectable feature set. While you can use images to create a slideshow, you can also highlight posts or articles, pages, and categories. There are also numerous other features, which is surprising considering this plugin is free.
You can create skins, manage thumbnails, upload an unlimited number of slides, and harness the power of the latest developer technology to optimize the performance of your slideshow.