Sliders are beautiful and an easy way to grab user attention. You can add videos, text, buttons anything you want in a slider. But the problem is that you don’t want the slider to slow down your site. In this article, I will show you how to create beautiful multimedia slides in WordPress using my favorite WordPress slider plugin, Soliloquy.
Why Soliloquy is The Best WordPress Slider Plugin?
If I am going to use sliders on a web page, I don’t want it slow down my site. Soliloquy is highly optimized to make sure that slides load faster without affecting page load times. This reason alone is strong enough for anyone to use Soliloquy, but there is more.
Soliloquy creates fully responsive sliders which look equally great on desktop, mobile, and tablets. It scales down beautifully with no degradation in quality and works like a charm on touch devices.
SEO is a big concern for most online businesses. Soliloquy is the most SEO friendly WordPress slider. It makes adding alt tags and titles to your slides super easy which helps boost search rankings.
Lastly, if I am creating a site for someone else. I want to use something that is easy to use. Soliloquy is very beginner friendly and anyone with little know how of using WordPress can create slides with Soliloquy.
How to Create Beautiful Multimedia Rich Slides with Soliloquy
First thing you need to do is purchase Soliloquy. The single site license is only $19 USD, but I will recommend the developer license which is $99 USD and gives you access to all basic addons.
Once you got the plugin, install and activate it like you would install any other WordPress plugin. Upon activation, you will notice the new Soliloquy menu item in your WordPress admin sidebar. To create a new slider you need to click on Soliloquy » Add New.
First you need to give your slider a title, after that click on select images button to upload images to you slider. If you want to choose images from your media library, add a video slide, or insert an HTML slide then you need to click on the button that reads ‘Click here to Insert Slides from Other Sources’.
Lets upload a couple of images to your slide, and then click on other sources button. This bring up a new popup with three tabs. You can choose images from your media library, add videos, or insert an HTML slide. Click on the videos tab and you will notice that you can add videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and Wistia and Vimeo. Simply paste your video URL and provide a title and caption for the video if needed. After that click on ‘Insert Slides into Slider’ button.
Soliloquy allows you to not only add images and videos, but also HTML slides. This means you can create a slide using HTML and CSS and insert it to your slider. This feature is particularly useful for developers and designers, it allows them to create slides with text, buttons, images, and anything else they may want to add in a single slide. When you click on the HTML slide tab you will see a plain HTML editor where you can paste your HTML code.
Once you have added your slides, they will appear like this:
Each of your slide has two buttons on it, the red button will remove a slide a from the slider. The blue button with info icon will allow you to edit the slide. This is where you can add meta data to your slides, add links to them, and provide captions.
Soliloquy allows you to control advanced options for each slider you create. Simply click on the Config tab to view those options. You can choose animation, theme, arrows, navigation, and control settings here.
Once you are satisfied with the slider, simply click on the publish button. Once your slider is published, it is available to be added anywhere on your WordPress site using shortcodes and template tags. To view those shortcodes, click on the share icon and Soliloquy will show you those tags. Simply copy the shortcode and add it to your posts or pages. Or copy the template tag, and paste it in your WordPress theme files.
Easy wasn’t it? I will encourage you to play around with the advanced options on the config tab of your slider and experiment with different slider sizes, animations, and fade effects.
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