Friday, September 27, 2019

How to Choose a WordPress Slider or Carousel Plugin

Sliders are very popular design elements. They are the most dynamic way to display visual media on your website. You can use them in hundreds of ways to engage visitors on your website.  

There are hundreds of slider plugins available for WordPress to help you build, organize, and manage your sliders. 

In this article, I will show you how to pick a WordPress slider plugin from CodeCanyon. 

What is a Slider?

A slideshow on a webpage is called slider. Sliders display images horizontally or vertically one image at a time and produce a feeling of momentum. Sliders can function in many ways: image sliders, video sliders, product sliders, text sliders and so on. 

A carousel is an advanced slider. It rotates and displays several images at a time by bringing multiple sliders into focus at once. Carousels rotate images radially and sometimes have a 3D feel. 

Keep in mind that the definitions of sliders and carousels are now used interchangeably. You can look at slider as an umbrella term that encompasses both slider and carousel. 

What are Sliders Used For?

Here is how sliders are commonly used: 
  • Photos drive purchasing decisions. Users have come to expect sellers will show them multiple-angle photos of every product they browse on eCommerce sites. Sliders are perfect for this purpose. 
  • Sliders focus attention to specific information and products you want visitors to engage with. It drives them to click and find out more about the featured content.
  • Sliders are perfect medium for artists, designers, developers, architects to showcase work, demonstrating their range and their versatility.
  • Sliders are perfect for creating text-accompanied visual demonstrations of how to use a product like an electronic gadget or industrial machine. 
  • Display dynamic content like testimonials or timelines.

Why Use Sliders?

  • Sliders save space by consolidating content.
  • Sliders consolidate images for easy viewing.
  • Reading a long page of text is a daunting task. Sliders provide mental breaks and pacing that make engaging with long content on your page a pleasant experience. 
  • When sliders are done right, the give users control of how fast or slow they want to engage with slider content. 

What is a Slider Plugin?

A slider plugin is a piece of code that helps you add a slideshow functionality into your WordPress website. It allows you create your own sliders and add them on a webpage, blog posts, eCommerce store, and so on. 

How to Choose a Slider Plugin

WordPress slider plugins from CodeCanyon offer a variety of affordable and easy-to-use templates you can choose from in order to build your sliders. Things to consider when choosing a slider plugin include:

Speed: Sliders contain a lot of scripts that can make your website load slowly. This affects performance, user satisfaction and SEO ranking. So make sure to compare loading times data of plugins you’re considering. Also make sure your hosting service has fast servers. 

Ease of Use: Slider plugins with user-friendly interfaces don’t eat up your time or divert your focus from running your business. 

Mobile Responsiveness: Make sure the slider plugin you choose is mobile responsive. The ability of a plugin to scale to small screen handheld mobile devices is of utmost importance. 80% of traffic now comes from mobile phones and tablets. 

Pricing: Compare prices of plugins and see what fits your budget. Are you also getting the most important features for the money you plan on spending? 

Regular Updates & Security: Regular audits and updates patch security weakness. Make sure the seller still supports the plugin. 

Reviews & Ratings: Read reviews of by other users. This is the most reliable way of knowing whether a plugin is useful and lives up to users’ expectations. 


Best Practices When Creating Sliders & Carousels

1. Aesthetics are Important

Make your sliders visually pleasing. Adopt a consistent tone that blends in with your website. Keep the text short and clear. 

2. A Clear Purpose for Each Slider

Each slider must have a clear and specific purpose. For example, directing attention to specific article or product on your website.

3. Prominent Positioning 

Make sure to strategically place your slider where it can be easily noticed. Don’t bury in the middle of content content. The best positions is at the top.

4. Get to the Point! 

Visitors don’t have all the time in the world. Your slide selection and arrangement should get straight to the point and fast. Your fast and last slide should be memorable. 

5. But Slow it Down

Avoid autoplay. Slow down rotation times so visitors can engage with your slides.  

6. Put the Visitor in Control

Give users control by including interactive navigation option like pause, skip, back. And also make slides easily clickable—especially for mobile users. 

7. Avoid Gimmicks

Avoid advertisers gimmicks. Advertisers use carousels in intrusive and aggressive ways that turn off visitors to websites. Your aim is to engage visitors to your website not to grab them by the collars. 

8. Use Proper HTML

Finally, don’t use H1 tags on your slider or carousel. Search engines treat H1 tags like the page titles. You can’t multiple page titles representing a single page. So you can imagine the confusion for search engines and page readers if you use H1 tags for your sliders or carousels.  

Gauging Effectiveness of Slides on Your Website

You can find out if sliders are effective by tracking how visitors are interacting with them on your website. This will help you experiment with different strategies for making your sliders more engaging. For example, if you see user engagement is high at the beginning of the sliders but tapers off in the middle and there is no engagement at the end of the sliders then you need to figure out a way of making your middle to final sliders more engaging. 

WordPress Sliders on CodeCanyon

There are a wide variety of slider plugins you can find on CodeCanyon. The categories below should help make your choice easy. 

All-Purpose Sliders 

These are some of the most versatile and feature-loaded slider plugins on CodeCanyon. 

Carousel

Carousels display sliders with multiple images visible at the same time. In practice, most slider plugins also have carousel modes and the terms are used interchangeably. 

Responsive Sliders

These sliders are designed with small screen handheld mobile devices in mind. 

Before and After Sliders 

Before and after slides are perfect for artists and designers who wants to showcase their skills - for example a designer may want to show before and after photos of something they have transformed from average to excellent. 

WPBakery Page Builder (Visual Composer) Slider Add-ons

WP Bakery is one of the most popular page builders and is compatible with many plugins including these slider plugins. 

Learn more about WPBakery and WordPress page builders with other posts here on Envato Tuts+.

WooCommerce

These slider plugins will allow you create engaging displays for products on your eCommerce site. 

Testimonial

Customers trust what other customers say. This means customers testimonials are stamp of approval for your business. These sliders are perfect for showing visitors to your website you have a proven track record with customers. 

Social 

These sliders make it easy share your content on social media in a way that stands out. 

Timeline

Displaying your WordPress timeline in a slider

Bonus: Some Other Specialty Sliders

These specialty sliders 

Finally, the following plugins are not image sliders but utilize aspects of slider functionality to help your website look and function smartly.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of slider plugins. In this post I outlined some of the most popular WordPress slider plugins you will find on CodeCanyon. 

Also note that many gallery plugins also have sliders and carousels incorporated in them. You can find out more in the articles below.


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