12 Best WordPress Slider Plugins for 2019 (Compared)

Do you want to add a beautiful slider to your WordPress site? When created with the right tool, WordPress sliders can make your site more engaging, more interactive, and more fun. But choosing the perfect plugin can feel quite difficult because there’re so many different slider plugins on the market. So, we’ve handpicked some of the best ones for you.

In this article, we’ll share the best WordPress slider plugins for 2019.

How to Choose the Right WordPress Slider Plugin

By adding sliders, you can make your site more eye-catching, but they can sometimes let you down with compromised speed and other issues. You need to be very careful when choosing a slider plugin.

Don’t miss to follow our complete article on the best WordPress plugins that you must use on your website.

Basically, there’re 3 things you have to look for in a slider plugin:

First, you need to make sure that your slider plugin is fully responsive. Responsiveness is a fundamental feature that every website should maintain because increasingly more people are using small-screen handheld devices to browse the internet. If your sliders don’t fit well on such devices, you’ll miss out on a lot.

Second is ease of use. Several plugins are on the market but just a few plugins offer user-friendly interfaces. Never pick a complicated plugin because you’ll lose a lot of important things while just learning how to use your slider plugin.

Third, and probably the most important thing, is speed. It’s often reported that slider plugins slow down websites and increase loading time for your webpages. If a slider slows down your site, there’s no point using that plugin. Because website speed is really important for SEO, user experience, and overall business growth.

So, you’ll need to check at least these 3 things (responsiveness, ease of use, and speed) when choosing a slider plugin.

Now, let’s go ahead and view the top 11 slider plugins for WordPress.

1. Soliloquy

Soliloquy is the best responsive WordPress slider plugin available on the market. When we tested the plugin with all 3 requirements mentioned above, it performed excellently on all of them. It’s fully responsive, easy to use, and lightweight. Created by a team of WordPress experts using high-quality coding and best technology, it offers the best features for building beautiful sliders.

Soliloquy comes with a simple and user-friendly interface to help you create sliders with ease. It integrates well with your WordPress interface and lets you use images from your media library. You can easily add images, configure your slider settings, and publish them.

Once you’ve created a slider, you can embed the slider in your pages and posts easily from the Add Slider button above your post editor. Or, you can add the slider in different parts of your site using a shortcode, widget, or template tag.

Read our complete Soliloquy review.

2. Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is one of the most powerful slider plugins for WordPress. This WordPress slider plugin has a free version that offers fully responsive, SEO optimized sliders for any WordPress themes. The free version also comes with a dynamic post slider that lets you highlight recent posts or featured posts.

With the pro version of the plugin, you can edit your slides just as you do with page builders. Its easy-to-use drag and drop features let you easily build a slider the way you want. It also comes with 6 unique layers for building a highly customized WordPress slider.

Read our complete Smart Slider 3 review.

3. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is the best-selling WordPress slider plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace. It comes with a powerful visual editor with which you can easily create, and customize sliders in WordPress.

The plugin is fully responsive so that your sliders will look great on every device including desktops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones. Another interesting feature is it’s a true multi-media support slider, meaning you can use images, videos, social media feed, as well as WordPress posts and custom posts.

Although it offers powerful features and functionalities to help you create great sliders, it misses out some aspects of user-friendliness. For example, you’ll need to go to the list of your sliders to find a code to add your slider, while Soliloquy makes it easy with the Add Slider button in the post editor. Also, its interface looks different than the rest of the WordPress UI, so beginners can find it a bit difficult at first.

Read our complete Slider Revolution review.

4. LayerSlider

LayerSlider is another popular plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace. It’s an advanced plugin with lots of powerful options to let you create sliders, image galleries with effects, animated landing pages, page blocks, or even a full website.

Similar to Slider Revolution, LayerSlider also has its own drag and drop interface for building sliders. So, when you’re starting out with it, you may need to spend a few days learning its interface.

The strength of the plugin is that it lets you add a variety of transitions and animations in your sliders. You can use more than 200 pre-defined slide transitions, parallax, and different animations. Plus, you can find a multitude of premium slider templates that you can use for your personal needs, professional business websites, presentation of your creative work, etc.

Read our complete LayerSlider review.

5. RoyalSlider

RoyalSlider is yet another top-selling slider plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace but it has fewer customization options, transitions, and animation effects when compared with the above two CodeCanyon plugins. However, it has all the standard features that you’ll need to make sliders for WordPress sites.

RoyalSlider focuses on an intuitive interface and better performance. It lets you create touch-friendly and responsive sliders for easy navigation. It has a lazy-loading option to help you improve your page speed. Plus, it’s optimized for SEO.

With RoyalSlider, you can easily integrate your Instagram and Flickr photos in your WordPress sliders. Also, it supports YouTube and Vimeo videos for building more engaging sliders.

6. Slider by WD

Slider by WD is a free premium WordPress plugin for creating responsive sliders. The plugin lets you create fast loading and SEO friendly sliders that you can add to your website posts, pages, theme headers, sidebars, and other locations with ease.

You can add both image and video sliders with different transition effects, whereas more advanced features aren’t available in its free version. Filmstrip, carousel, and parallax effects are available only in the paid version. Besides, you can create multi-functional sliders with text, image, video, hotspot, and social media button layers with the paid version of the plugin.

Slider by WD plugin also supports swipe control for touchscreen devices and that’s one of its strengths. However, the slider embed options aren’t as friendly as Soliloquy. You’ll need to copy and paste the slider shortcode to embed the slider in posts and pages whereas Soliloquy lets you add directly from the post editor from the Add Slider button.

7. WonderPlugin WordPress Slider

WonderPlugin WordPress Slider is a simple and responsive WordPress slider plugin. It’s available in both free and premium versions. If you choose the free version, it’ll add a watermark that links to the plugin’s homepage.

WonderPlugin WordPress Slider supports images, YouTube, Vimeo, mp4, and WebM videos as well as WordPress posts. You can create both horizontal and vertical slideshows with thumbnails, and embed them easily on your site.

Moreover, it comes with stunning transition effects, like the built-in lightbox effect to create attractive sliders. Most noteworthy of all, it has a wizard-style user interface that helps you make a slider easily step-by-step.

8. Smooth Slider

The Smooth Slider plugin helps you to create smooth and pleasing sliders and carousels for WordPress sites. It’s specifically designed for the WordPress CMS so it offers a really simple and user-friendly interface for WordPress users.

The plugin helps you to build a variety of sliders like post sliders, image sliders, and video sliders. You can simply use the images in your WordPress media gallery and build image sliders. To make your sliders look unique, it lets you customize the typography, transition speed, effect, background color, slider height, width, etc.

Once you’ve created the sliders, you can add them to your site using shortcode, widget, or template tag. You can also export the sliders with complete settings to other sites.

9. Master Slider

Master Slider is a beautiful WordPress touch slider plugin that supports touch navigation with pure swipe gesture. It’s fully responsive and mobile-friendly that adapts well to all devices and screens.

It’s an awesome layer slider that has the ability to turn any HTML content (such as text and images) into layers. It supports images, videos, WordPress posts, WooCommerce products, Facebook albums, and Flickr galleries. Above all, it provides you with over 90 pre-built sliders that you can use on your site.

The plugin has Visual Composer integrated into it, so building sliders is simple using its drag and drop frontend editor.

10. MetaSlider

MetaSlider is a simple-yet-powerful WordPress slider plugin that enables you to create fully responsive slideshows in no time. It comes with tons of powerful features such as video support, thumbnail navigation, post feed slides, animated layer slides, etc.

The plugin combines the power of 4 plugins: Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides, and Coin Slider. So, you can choose and use all of their features in 1 plugin. In addition, it’s compatible with all the major WordPress plugins and themes.

MetaSlider is available in both free and premium versions, so you can first try its free version to check its usability.

11. Meteor Slides

Meteor Slides is a free slider plugin for WordPress that you can download from the official WordPress plugin repository and use on as many websites as you like. It helps you to create simple image slideshows in WordPress.

Meteor Slides is a mobile-friendly plugin that scales to fit any device and supports touch navigation for mobiles and tablets. To embed the sliders in your site, you’ll need to use a shortcode, template tag, or widget.

Compared to other plugins on this list, it lacks several options and functionalities. You cannot add videos to your sliders. However, you can use it for simple image slideshows.

12. FlexSlider

FlexSlider is another free plugin for creating WordPress sliders. The plugin allows you to create fully responsive jQuery sliders easily.

Using this plugin, you can add both horizontal and vertical slides, and fade animations to them. It supports all the major browsers, touch navigation, and compatible with the latest version of jQuery.

The plugin is a simple jQuery slider toolkit that you can use for simple sliders.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress slider plugins. You might also want to check out our guide on the best image gallery WordPress plugins.