If you have a WordPress site, you’ll probably want it to look amazing! To help you achieve this, you might want to incorporate a WordPress carousel slider plugin that allows you to feature several posts/products/graphics at one time on your site.
The great thing about a WordPress plugin is that it makes adding these sliders super easy (if you choose the right one for beginners). Sliders and carousels are really effective design elements that can help your website look good and improve user engagement.
They allow a large number of images or content to exist in a single space instead of forcing your visitors to scroll down all the way down a page. They also reduce clutter.
But choose the wrong one and you’ll notice how slow it can be. If the slider plugin isn’t coded right, the slider can really increase your page load time. Couple that with a less than par hosting service and your server will respond with snail-like loading times.
This is why you need to make sure you choose the best WordPress carousel slider plugin for your site. And you also want to make sure that the one you choose is the best running time on both desktop and mobile devices.
So which WordPress slider plugins are best for your site on desktop and mobile devices?
Today, I’ll be sharing the 10 Best WordPress Carousel/Slider Plugins to help you spice up your site. These plugins allow you to create stylish slideshows and carousels with ease.
They can display images, posts, pages, products, and any types of post types on your website. They’re mobile-friendly, so they’ll look great on any device. Let’s get started.
Originally Published Oct 24 2018, updated Jan 31 2023
1. Smart Slider 3
Total downloads: 900,000+
A responsive, beautiful, mobile-ready, fully responsive, and SEO optimized slider plugin for WordPress website.
Features:
- Content slide builder – Edit your slides as you used to in page builders.
- Canvas slide builder – Drag and drop your layers anywhere on the slide.
- Slide library – Slide Library provides several pre-made slides to kickstart your work.
- Totally integrated with WordPress – Media manager, shortcode, widget, post permalinks, post editor.
- Page Builder support – Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Visual Composer
- Totally responsive and touch-friendly – Sliders can be enjoyed on any device, be it a mobile, tablet or desktop.
- Dynamic Slides – Available source: WordPress posts
- Customizable controls – Arrows, Bullets, Autoplay, Bar, Thumbnails, Shadows
- Slide backgrounds – 9 Super smooth background animations
- Layers – Build unique design with 6 varied layers: Image, Heading, Text, Button, Vimeo, YouTube
- Font and Style manager system – Change easily all the details that really matter in typography and style.
2. MetaSlider
Total downloads: 700,000+
The most popular, fully responsive, and SEO-friendly WordPress slider plugin.
Features:
- Simple, easy to use interface – perfect for individual users, developers & clients!
- Create Responsive, SEO-optimized slideshows in seconds
- Unrestricted support for Image slides (supports caption, link, title text, alt text)
- Full width slideshow support
- Drag and drop slide reordering
- Admin preview
- Intelligent image cropping
- Set image crop position
- Built in Widget and Shortcode
- Loads of slideshow configuration options – transition effect, speed etc (per slideshow)
- Fully localized
- WordPress Multi Site compatible
- Compatible with translation plugins (WPML, PolyLang & qTranslate)
- Extensive Developer API (hooks & filters)
- Fast – only the minimum JavaScript/CSS is included on your page
- Free basic support (covering installation issues and theme/plugin conflicts)
- Lightbox support
3. Slide Anything
Total downloads: 100,000+
Slide Anything allows you to create a carousel/slider where the content for each slide can be anything you want – images, text, HTML, and even shortcodes.
The slideshow is also responsive and will automatically adjust for the screen it is being displayed on.
4. Slider by Soliloquy
Total downloads: 60,000+
The Soliloquy Slider allows you to create beautiful responsive image and video sliders for your WordPress site in minutes. Works perfectly on mobile, tablet, laptop, and desktop.
Features:
- Drag & Drop Builder
- 100% Responsive – Mobile Friendly
- Beautiful Templates for Customization
- Featured Content – Easily create slideshows based on blog posts, pages, products, testimonials, and other custom post types.
- WooCommerce – Create beautiful product slides for your WooCommerce store.
- Lightbox – Create Lightbox slideshows for your photos and galleries.
- Carousel – Create responsive carousels for your images, photos, videos, and galleries.
- Thumbnails – Add thumbnail images as navigation.
- Instagram – Import images from Instagram.
- PDFs – From your presentation slides and other PDF files.
- Pinterest – Easily add Pinterest “Pin It” buttons.
- CSS Styles – Customize with custom CSS.
- Image Protection – Protect your images with Soliloquy protection addon.
- Schedule Slides – Easily schedule items to display at specific time intervals.
- Default Settings – Speed up your creation with customized Default settings.
5. Responsive Image Slider for WordPress
Total downloads: 50,000+
WordPress Carousel is the most powerful and user-friendly WordPress Carousel plugin to create beautiful carousels with Images, Posts, WooCommerce Products etc.
This plugin will allow you simply select images from WordPress media library, drag and drop them into place and also supports WordPress posts and WooCommerce products.
It’s fully responsive, highly customizable and works smoothly on iPhone, iPad, Android, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Edge.
Full Feature List:
- Fully Responsive and Touch-friendly.
- Lightweight, Fast & Powerful.
- Shortcode Generator.
- Extremely User-friendly Admin Panel.
- Create Carousel using images from media gallery, posts, products etc.
- Drag and drop image slides Re-ordering.
- Multiple Carousels. (Create unlimited carousels into same page)
- Multisite Supported.
- Set border for image slide.
- AutoPlay on/off.
- AutoPlay Speed Control.
- Stop on hover carousel.
- Infinite looping for the carousel.
- Show/hide Navigation and Pagination dots.
- Navigation & Pagination dots color.
- Unlimited color and styling options.
- Control carousel columns on different devices.
- Display random order.
- Unique settings for each carousel.
- Touch Swipe options.
- Mouse Draggable enable or disable.
- Multilingual Ready.
- RTL Supported.
- Widget Supported.
- Compatible with any theme.
- Advanced Settings to enqueue or dequeue Scripts/CSS.
- Custom CSS field to override styles.
- Developer friendly & easy to customize.
- SEO friendly & optimized for speed.
- Support all modern browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Edge etc.
- Documentation and Video Tutorials.
- Fast and Active Support.
- And much more options.
6. Carousel Slider
Total downloads: 40,000+
A responsive and SEO-friendly carousel slider plugin for Images, Logos, Videos, Posts, WooCommerce Products and much more.
Key Features:
- Fully responsive
- Unlimited slides
- Touch and grab enabled
- CSS3 3D acceleration
- Lazy load images
- Multiple instances on a single page
- Navigation and pagination with unlimited colors
- Supports all major browsers
- And more features
7. WP Responsive Recent Post Slider/Carousel
Total downloads: 30,000+
Attractive & eye-catching WP Responsive Recent Post Slider and Carousel.
Features:
- Added Gutenberg block support.
- Post slider
- Post carousel
- Easy to add.
- Also work with Gutenberg shortcode block.
- Given 4 designs.
- Media size ie thumbnail, medium, medium_large, large and full
- Responsive.
- Responsive touch slider.
- Mouse Draggable.
- You can create multiple post slider with different options at single page or post.
- Custom post type support.
- Exclude Post with their ID’s that you do not want to display.
8. Depicter Slider
Total downloads: 30,000+
Depicter is a free SEO friendly, responsive image and video slider that truly works on all major devices with super smooth hardware accelerated transitions. It supports touch navigation with pure swipe gesture that you have never experienced before.
Features:
- Visual Builder – Professional, yet simple and intuitive visual slider builder
- Comprehensive Asset Library – A huge and free library of 3.2M images, 30K videos, vectors, mockups, pre-built templates and elements at your service.
- Flexible Layouts & Responsiveness – Make a truly responsive and mobile-friendly slider that looks perfect across all devices.
- Animations & Interactivity – Capture your users’ attention by adding interaction with super smooth animations and interactive actions to sliders.
- Versatile Video Player – Play any type of video including self-hosted, YouTube and Vimeo videos in your slider responsively.
- Truly Customizable – Customize video controls, mute, loop, autoPlay and toggle fullscreen; all with few simple clicks!
- Modern Image Editing Tools – Crop images responsively and apply image filters within few clicks!
- Lightweight & SEO-Friendly – Super lightweight and dependency-free slider which delivers your content optimized for search engines.
- Comprehensive Navigation Controls – Add arrows, bullets, line timer, slideshow controls, and scroll indicators to your slider by drag and drop.
- Touch Swipe & Mouse Navigation – Mouse and keyboard navigation, super natural touch swipe and mouse swipe gestures are right at your service too.
- Fully Responsive – Adjust the content and presentation of your slider to every device. You can deliver the most optimized experience for each visitor, no matter they’re viewing your website on Desktop, Tablet or Mobile.
- Template Sliders – 130+ high quality to import and start with, within one simple click!
- Expert Support– Our expert support team ready to help you. Ask your questions in the support forum, or contact us directly through live chat and our exclusive help desk.
9. Logo Carousel
Total downloads: 20,000+
The Logo Carousel is a powerful and aesthetically pleasing logo showcase and client logo gallery plugin for WordPress. With its intuitive Shortcode Generator, you can easily display a group of logos in a visually stunning carousel on any WordPress website. The user-friendly interface makes it convenient to manage and display the logo images on your site.
Features:
- Fully responsive & mobile friendly.
- Elegant, lightweight, and powerful.
- Easy Shortcode Generator.
- Unlimited logo carousels (Multiple instances on the same page).
- Unique settings for each carousel.
- Control logo columns in different devices.
- Logo section title and bottom margin.
- Logo margin (space between logos).
- Logo border width, style, color, and hover color.
- Logo title attribute.
- AutoPlay On/Off.
- AutoPlay speed control.
- Pagination speed control.
- Stop on the hover carousel.
- Infinite looping for the carousel.
- Preloader option.
- Show/hide navigation.
- Show/hide pagination.
- Navigation and pagination hide on mobile.
- Navigation color control options.
- Pagination dots color and hover color.
- Logo order & order by.
- Touch swipe enable/disable.
- Mouse draggable enable/disable.
- Translation ready.
- RTL and LTR carousel direction.
- Advanced plugin settings page.
- Clean-up data on deletion option.
- Custom CSS field to override styles.
- Scripts and styles enqueue and dequeue options.
- Compatible with any theme.
- Developer friendly.
- SEO friendly & optimized for speed.
- Support all modern browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.
- Fast and active support.
- And many more options.
10. WP Slick Slider and Image Carousel
Total downloads: 20,000+
WP Slick Slider and Image Carousel – one of the most sought-after and popular Slick Slider plugins in the market. This powerful plugin allows you to display an eye-catching and dynamic image slider and carousel on your website with ease, using a simple shortcode generator. The plugin is fully responsive, swipe-enabled, and supports infinite looping, making it perfect for any device or screen size. It also features desktop mouse dragging, arrow key navigation, autoplay, dots, arrows, and much more.
In addition, WP Slick Slider and Image Carousel utilizes a custom post type and taxonomy to create a slider, giving you almost unlimited options and the ability to add multiple sliders to any page on your site. Whether you want to showcase your logos, highlight your products or services, or display a slideshow in your header, this plugin has got you covered.
Conclusion:
Picking a slider plugin isn’t easy. There are a lot of options to choose from, and they all seem pretty similar on paper.
The good news is that after trying many out, we were able to narrow down the list to ten reliable choices.
They had to be flexible, provide customization features and functionality, be compatible with the latest WordPress versions and browsers, and have great reviews from other users who tested them in the field. By taking all of this into account, we’re confident that we’ve come up with the top ten slider plugins for WordPress users.
You can always look at the free carousel/slider plugins, but if your needs are special then you may want to go with a premium plugin. We hope that this list of carousel/slider plugins for WordPress has been useful.
