Slider has always been a highly requested feature on many WordPress as these sliders allows you to showcase either posts or products together in one area that you wish to draw attention to.

You will see there are a number of ways to achieve this with different effects and a lot of WordPress themes has already have a slider option built in. But one of the best ways to handle a slider in your theme is to use a plugin for the job as this will ensure you that you won’t lose and of your slider content when you are wanting to change the theme.

So for this weeks WordPress Wednesday roundup you will see below that I’ve have chosen 8 of the best free & premium that you can choose from for your own site.

1. Slide Deck 2 – Free

SlideDeck 2 for WordPress is a responsive slider plugin that lets you easily create content sliders out of almost any content. Connect to a variety of Content Sources like YouTube, Flickr, WordPress posts and Pinterest to create gorgeous, dynamic sliders in a few clicks you don’t need to know any coding either.

2. Meteor Slides – Free

Meteor Slides makes it simple to create slideshows and publish them with a shortcode, widget, or template tag. The slideshows scale with responsive and fluid themes to fit any device and have touch support which is powered by jQuery Cycle that has over twenty transition styles to choose from.

3. Smooth Slider – Free

In less than 50 seconds you can embed a recent posts, category specific or featured posts slider using the Smooth Slider plugin. As it creates a dynamic slideshows for featured Posts, Pages, Media Images and Custom Post Types on a WordPress site.

With live preview on admin panel, one can customize the slider before implementation. Smooth Slider is a basic slider WordPress plugin but is capable of adding a nice carousel in no time. With shortcode, widgets and template tag, one can embed Smooth SLider anywhere in the site.

4. Posts Slider – Free

Posts Slider is a WordPress posts content slider plugin with touch for mobile devices. Posts slider displays your blog’s recent posts using beautiful slider. Description Posts slider is light weight touch supported, responsive posts content slider plugin.Manage your posts to show in slider with custom taxanomies (categories, tags,authors e.t.c), With pre-designed layouts to save your time. Simple and easy to use, no coding skills required.

5.

With the Slider Revolution plugin you can create a responsive(mobile friendly) or fullwidth slider with must-see-effects while in meanwhile you can keep or build your SEO optimisation as all content always readable for search engines.

When you buy this plugin you can see heaps of custom transitions/animations for each object on the page, and you  can customise this slider with the convenient drag & drop backend to your very needs.

This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects.

6.

Royal Slider plugin for WordPress is responsive image gallery and HTML content slider plugin with touch swipe navigation.

This Plugin is mobile-friendly and allows creating completely custom slideshows and css3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides.

You can also dynamically populate data from Flickr, 500px, Instagram or featured posts of any post type – like WooCommerce products. This plugin has been developed with the best practices of CSS3 and HTML5. For photo gallery you can enable vertical or horizontal thumbnails, enable lazy-loading or fullscreen. Carousel also supports YouTube or Vimeo videos that allows you to create video galleries.

7

Master Slider WordPress is a premium high quality designed image and content slider for WordPress, with super smooth hardware accelerated transitions.

This plugin 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, …) 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.

8

LayerSlider is a premium multi-purpose slider for creating image galleries, content sliders, and mind-blowing slideshows with must-see effects, even from your WordPress posts and pages.

The plugin uses cutting edge technologies to provide the smoothest experience that’s possible, and it comes with more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions and has a beautiful but easy-to-use admin interface with supporting modern features like drag & drop WYSIWYG slider builder, real-time previews, timeline view, Google Fonts and transition builder for custom animations. It’s device friendly by supporting responsive mode, many layouts, touch gestures on mobile devices, and uses techniques like lazy load and conditional script loading for optimal performance.

You can add any content into sliders, including images, text, custom HTML, YouTube and Vimeo videos or HTML5 self-hosted multimedia contents. It’s also SEO friendly by allowing you to build semantic markup with custom attributes that search engines can index easily. LayerSlider comes with 13 built-in skins, and it has tons of options to entirely customise the appearance and behavior of your sliders at the smallest detail.