Best Slideshow (Content Slider) Plugins for WordPress

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Call them content sliders, slideshows, rotating images, or anything you want, these effects are here to stay. They're great at showcasing your portfolio or to highlight some of the best content on your WordPress blog or website. Here's a list of the best free and premium content slider and slideshow plugins available for your WordPress sites.
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Call them content sliders, slideshows, rotating images, or anything you want, these effects are here to stay. They’re great at showcasing your portfolio or to highlight some of the best content on your WordPress blog or website.

Here’s a list of the best free and premium content slider and slideshow plugins available for your WordPress sites.

Prime Slider Pro

Prime Slider Pro is a valuable addition for anyone aiming to upgrade their Elementor-based website with attractive and practical sliders. Its compatibility with WooCommerce, wide range of widgets, and easy-to-use interface make it a flexible choice for both novice and expert designers. With its reasonable cost and robust customer support, Prime Slider Pro stands out as a must-have for any WordPress toolkit.

Pricing

1 Site $29.99 | 5 Sites $59.99 | Unlimited Sites $199.99

Get Prime Slider Pro

Meta Slider

meta-slider-plugin

Meta Slider is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress, having a 5 star rating on wordpress.org, and according to its developer, receiving over 10,000 downloads per week. One of the main reasons for this is that it has 4 different slideshow types, all of which implement a drag-and-drop function to select your images from your WP media library, allowing you to edit each one. Be it setting captions for the images, or applying links, you can do all this from one page, while always being SEO optimized. The possibilities with this plugin seem endless, and you can view some of them on this examples page.

Pricing

Free | 2 Sites $39 | 5 Sites $59 | 20 Sites $89 | Unlimited Sites $149

Get Meta Slider

SlideDeck

slidedeck

SlideDeck is an easy to use slider plugin that offers multiple slider types, including images, videos, text and html. Each slider can be of one type, or a mix of different content types (from WP posts to Pinterest), even including multiple layouts and captions. It also has a drag-n-drop feature for the slides which works well with the sleek Live Preview it offers right in the custom UI. According to the developer, its use of 12 lenses and the large selection of sources and options available mean that there are over 29 million possible combinations.

Pricing

Annual Plan $47 | Lifetime Plan $247

Get SlideDeck

Soliloquy

soliloquy

Certainly one of the fastest responsive slider plugins out there, Soliloquy is a great plugin to showcase your images and videos. It allows for an unlimited amount of possible sliders, and the possibility of multiple sliders on the same page.  Its UI is very similar to that of WP itself, and it offers a large variety of options to modify your slider. It also uses a drag-and-drop interface, enhanced by Ajax, to sort your images, all of which can in turn have their metadata edited. Another great touch (albeit using a developer license) are all the addons available for Soliloquy, which help you create some awesome looking sliders.

Pricing

Personal $19 | Multi $49 | Developer $99 | Master $249

Get Soliloquy

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is the most powerful and intuitive WordPress plugin to create sliders.

Create beautiful, responsive andSEO friendly sliders in minutes using a visual, drag’n’drop slide editor. If you don’t feel like starting from scratch, you can select from 100+ gorgeous slider templates, which you can fully customize in any way. Smart Slider 3 has more than 20 layers to add content to your slides.

The most popular layers are the heading, image, button, icon, YouTube, Vimeo and MP4 video layers, which you can add to any slide you create. Smart Slider 3 is compatible with Gutenberg editor, and with the most popular page builders like Divi and Elementor.

Pricing

Free | Single Domain $35 | Business $150 | Unlimited $250

Get Smart Slider 3

RoyalSlider

royalslider

RoyalSlider is one of the most widely-used slider plugins on some of the best designed sites, including that of photographer Pep Karsten. It’s a fully responsive, flexible and fluid slider plugin that offers over 10 templates, 5 skins and 100 options. Not only that – when it comes to content, you can include images, videos, HTML content, and, furthermore, you can populate data from various locations such as Flickr, Instagram, and others. It might not offer a lot of cool transition effects, but what it does offer is a clean, good-looking content slider that works great every time, on every device.

Pricing

Regular License $24 | Extended License $120

Get RoyalSlider

Slider Revolution

slider revolution

Slider Revolution has been called one of the best slider plugins out there, and with good reason. Its developers call it an “all-purpose slide displaying solution”. Incorporating various customizable transitions, customizable drag-n-drop captions, the ability to pull content right from your posts and customise it, and WPML support, among many others, this is one of the most feature-filled plugins that exist. It even offers full screen possibilities and many, many slide navigation features.

Pricing

Regular License $26 | Extended License $125

Get Slider Revolution

LayerSlider

layerslider-responsive-wordpress-slider-plugin

Being one of the best feature-filled slider plugins you can find, LayerSlider is a multi-purpose slider that offers you a vast range of options and customisation effects. The list of features is endless, but the main idea behind this plugin is to give your user the best experience upon visiting your site, while still keeping the slider smooth and responsive. It includes a drag-n-drop slider builder, real-time previews, Google Fonts, and much more. Its compatibility with other popular plugins such asWPML and qTranslate, and support of touch navigation are some of  the extra plus points that LayerSlider offers.

Pricing

Regular License $25 | Extended License $125

Get LayerSlider

Master Slider

master-slider-plugin

Master Slider is a premium high quality designed image and content slider for WordPress with super smooth hardware accelerated transitions. It supports touch navigation with pure swipe gesture that you have never experienced before. It’s a truly responsive and device friendly slider which works perfect in all major devices. Master Slider is an awesome layer slider as well, with the ability of adding any HTML contents (texts, images, etc) in layers. You almost have everything in Master Slider which is the most complete among the best, hotspots, thumbnails, variety of effects, Video support and much more.

Pricing

Regular License $24 | Developer License $74

Get Master Slider

Other Resources

Slider Villa

slidervilla-slider-plugins

SliderVilla is the first WordPress Slider Store with more than 15 best WordPress Slider plugins and 4 powerful add-ons. All sliders are responsive, SEO ready and optimized for the best performance.

It features a number of free and premium slider plugins such as the Smooth Slider and the new Foto Slider.

Visit the SliderVilla Store 

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a variety of free and premium options for content slider and slideshow plugins. They all offer something of value that can add that extra spark to your site to entice more visitors to hang around.

Have you used any of the plugins above or any others? What are your thought on them? Leave us a comment below.

UPDATE: This post was updated in November 2018, so certain comments below might refer to plugins that have since been removed. All free plugins were removed from the list as they had either been removed from the plugin repo for one reason or another, or were not updated in over a year.

Jean Galea

Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and blogger. He is the founder of WP Mayor, the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight, as well as the Mastermind.fm podcast. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com.

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35 Responses

  1. Thanks for sharing.
    You should try one more slider plugin which is Avartan Slider WordPress plugin. It has 150+ slides examples which you won’t find in any slider plugins. It gives you a millions of possibilities to create a stunning user interface with lots of features and functionalities. For more features:

  2. Hello im trying to find responsive slider that divides into 2/3 photo (not bg) and 1/3 right side for text, any ideas?

  3. There is another best free and premium responsive slider plugin with easy user interface, called “Avartan Slider Lite” and it’s pro version also available.

    Checkout this live link –

    I am using this great plugin on my demo site.

    Thanks to plugin owner.

    1. Hey @Alkesh, I have tried Avartan Slider Lite in one of my clients website. It looks great. I will recommend this to all my customers and also looking forward to buy its Pro version. Thanks for suggesting such a nice slider plugin.

  4. Nivo and Avia slider are the best, thanks for the sharing… need some plugins for google blogs..

  5. Thank you for this.
    Not technical, have SliderPro installed but it seems very difficult to contact them for any support on sizing images, HTML content, etc.
    The Nivo Slider looks interesting and includes some support right on the website (SliderPro is through a 3rd party bundler).
    Any comparisons you can give between SliderPro and Nivo?
    Thank you very much in advance!!

    1. I would go for Nivo Susa, it’s made by a very respected WordPress developer who offers good support, as well as a very solid plugin, probably the most popular one out there.

  6. Warning: I’m not a techie! So here’s my stupid question. We transitioned from WordPress MU to regular WordPress with content spread among multiple URLs. Do you know of slider that can run photos and content teasers from multiple URLs? In other words, we would like our home page to feature content from our other URLs. Thank you for any recommendations!

    1. Haven’t come across something that can do this Lisa, sorry! If you found anything please let us know.

  7. Hi Guys

    Can you help me, I’m trying to replace cu3er with Nivo on my homepage so that the slider can be seen on apple devices.

    I have the Nivo plugin activated but I just need to know which code I need to select to replace the Nivo code with.

    Your help would be very much appreciated

    Darren

  8. thanks for the slider review! This was the first helpful slider review that gives info without forcing a product down your throat.

    thanks again!
    Mike

  9. That’s a nice list of slider plugins. If you want to try a simple but rich content slider plugin for WordPress, try Smooth Slider which has already downloaded for more than 100K times.
    Search “Smooth Slider” on Google.

    Based on the same admin UI of Smooth Slider, there are few designer and stylish sliders available on SliderVilla. WordPress plugins like Roster, Pointelle, Pinwheel are available for very low price but having really nice features like Multiple Slider on single page and Custom Field insertion in Slider content (really good for e-commerce sites).
    Search SliderVilla on Google.

  10. Thanks a lot. This helped me find many open source alternatives for the commercial slide deck. Regards

    1. Welcome, I haven’t done extensive testing in this regard but I would say Nivo slider should be a sound choice if you’re looking for something light.

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