Slideshow in a WordPress Based Website
In this article, let us observe the options of adding a nice looking and manageable WordPress slideshow to your site without delving into the meat of coding controls of your template.
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Whether you are running a portfolio photography website or a business profile, image-based marketing should be a part of your digital struggles.
People opt for perceiving visual content more easily than textual one. Furthermore, visual pieces of content are better to remember and recollect.
All in all, high-resolution images and nice-looking slideshows can do wonders for absolutely any kind of website. They will not only be visually pleasing for your web visitors but will highly contribute to your website rankings and the degree of lead generation.
It can also characterize your business or company, stress your talents in this or that field, and finally, add more aesthetics and beautiful touches to your digital profile.
One of the productive ways of organizing the exhibition of your images and photos is to add slideshows and make them shine with a unique look.
It is particularly important for the business world to instantly impact its potential clients and draw their attention to the visual content to communicate the target message.
This being said we are thrilled to share our experience with you when it comes to adding a slideshow to a WordPress-powered website.
In certain cases, WordPress templates comprise pre-built homepage sliders with relevant transitions, animation, or other controls.
The principle of adding slides to the default slider is just the same as in the case of gallery creation based on the drag and drop of images via the media library.
In other cases, more functionality and controls can be added with the assistance of slider plugins and extensions.
You are powered to install any of the compatible plugins and add your slides to pages and posts, landing pages, or whenever you may find it expedient to have them.
For these purposes, we have chosen some of the best plugins as an example to add a slideshow with easy-to-follow steps and instructions.
Best Free WordPress Slider Plugins
1. Meta Slider
Crafting and enjoying your visual experience based on the Meta Slider plugin is one of the reasonable steps to take in case you want to have attention-grabbing visual materials and slideshows. This WordPress slideshow creation tool has already managed to win the storm of app users coming from more than 800.000 active installs of this plugin.
It is one of the intuitive and admin-optimized slider management systems that will never take too much time or nerves. Four different slideshow types are available, such as Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides, as well as Coin Slider. Each of them shares a certain amount of transition effects and 3 of them are readily responsive.
The uniquely developed interface of Meta Slider lets even the novice take thorough control over his website slides, make reordering of slides, add full-width slides to span the whole width of the page, etc.
This plugin is also multisite compatible, as well as translation ready to be translated into different languages. Naturally enough, the Pro version has launched with more features like YouTube and Vimeo slides, Layer slides with CSS3 touches and HTML5-based backgrounds, and more.
Getting started with Meta Slider to add a slideshow will also be a breeze for anyone. The easiest way is to jump to the Plugins section in your WordPress dashboard, Add new, look for the Meta Slider plugin, and install it. The appearance of the Meta Slider item in your admin menu will follow the installation.
In this stage, you will find the “+” button to create your slides and make them visible to your audience. The respective slideshow settings are available on the right part of the page, among them width, height, effect, navigation, and others.
To add slides to a slideshow you need to find the Add Slide button and upload images or choose from the existing ones in the library.
2. JetPack
The next valuable sample among slider and slideshow WordPress plugins installed and checked millions of times is JetPack.
It is one of the well-organized and developed products ready to offer you boundless image and slider controls and choose the best way to show them off through your website.
Create slideshows and tiled galleries, edit and manage them, and make your visual content 100 responsive and well laid out on different platforms and device screens. It comes available in the free version, as well as in personal, premium, and professional, which are premium.
Automatic installation can be done quickly. Or you may want to install the plugin manually while uploading the relevant files to your server.
The procedure is the same as in the above-discussed example relating to Meta Slider / Plugins/Add New, finding the plugin, and installing/.
This extension is useful not only for visual media creation and management but also for acting as a traffic generation and SEO tool, while including website statistics and analyses, sharing functionality for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google optimization, and more.
3. Simple Slideshow Manager
Meet Simple Slideshow Manager as one of the simplest tools to add a slideshow to your personal or corporate website.
Create and make visible an unlimited number of image and video slides, drag and reorder them, and finally, make them impeccably consistent with different portable devices and mobiles.
You will be capable of creating and adding slideshows in different ways – via shortcodes, widgets, and php codes. Hence, your slideshows can appear in the header and footer area, sidebar as a widget, as well as in any post or page of your website.
YouTube and Vimeo video support, fade in an fadeout delay configuration options, pause and animation, slide rotation interval configuration and much more are accessible within Simple Slideshow Manager.
Display nice looking and pixel-perfect slides on your site or blog in a matter of minutes, reorder your slides, and finally, turn to the extended documentation available whenever you are faced with some problem.