12 Best WordPress Image Galleries and Sliders

Written by Kevin Liew on 30 Jan 2013
84,878 Views • WordPress

Introduction

Image slider has been a great UI component to attract user attention. We can use it to showcase our portfolio, products and latest news and announcement. If you used it wisely, it's an effective and space-saving solution. There are hundreds of free image slider available online, most of them are pretty easy to install and feature-packed. Today, we are going to share a few free and premium image slider/slideshow specifically built for WordPress blogging platform. Most of them have a well-built backend with user friendly UI for non-coder to configure the slider easily.

Royal Slider

Royal Slider

RoyalSlider is powerful image gallery and content slider plugin. Every slider template is responsive and touch friendly. It supports responsive, semantic and SEO friendly, thumbnails, touch gestures, lazy-loading, video, permalinks for each slide and a bunch more of features. Script is available as jQuery and as WordPress plugin.

Smooth Slider

Smooth Slider

Free. Smooth Slider is a WordPress Plugin for creating a dynamic slideshow for featured posts on a blog. The slideshow created by Smooth Slider are JavaScript and Text based, that’s why bloggers and site owners will get full benefit of Search Engine Optimization as the texts are readable by Search Engine.

vSlider WordPress Image Slider

Free. A jQuery based image slider plugin. It can be used as header slider, category slider, post slider , slideshow or custom image gallery.

Nivo Slider

Nivo Slider

Premium: A well-known slider available as a standalone jQuery plugin and also WordPress plugin. It supports many transition effects, responsive and many configurable settings.

TN3Gallery Lite

TN3Gallery Lite

Free & Premium: TN3 Lite is a free version of TN3 Gallery. It’s branded with the TN3 logo and a link to the TN3 Gallery website. While this is fully functional and not a limited trial version, some of the premium features, such as albums, skinning, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook and XML support (as well as other features), are not included in this version.

SlideDeck 2 Lite

SlideDeck 2 Lite

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, Twitter, WordPress posts and Pinterest to create gorgeous, dynamic sliders in a few clicks - no coding is required.

jQuery Slider

jQuery Slider

Free. This is a highly customizable jQuery Slider plugin. You can set its width, height, pagination and other parameters. You can use it on your post or page via a shortcode or in your template file using php code.

Horizontal Slider

Horizontal Slider

Free. A horizontal slider plugin and widget for WordPress. Support shortcode so you can insert this slider to wherever you want.

cSlider

cSlider

Free. cSlider is easy-to-use. Create beautiful and stunning content sliders! This is the most simple and innovative content slider available for WordPress.

WOWSlider

WOWSlider

Free. WOW Slider is a WordPress slider with stunning visual effects and tons of professionally made templates. WOW Slider is packed with a point-and-click wizard to create fantastic image sliders in a matter of seconds without coding and image editing. Responsive, fully accessible as a pure CSS slider if the Javascript is turned off, touch swipe support, all browsers, all devices, search engine friendly, clean and valid markup.

Captain Slider

Captain Slider

Free. Self-claimed as the best free jQuery Slider/Slideshow plugin for WordPress. It supports responsive, many settings & multiple Sliders on a single page.

Full Background Slider

Full Background Slider

Free. A great plugin that allows you to add full page background slider to your website with a lots of custom features.

Hope you will find all these sliders for your WordPress project. If you have got some other that I have missed out, feel free to drop us a comment below.

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8 comments
Connie 11 years ago
The link to Slidedeck does not link to the free WP slider "Slidedeck Lite", there is no hint at that website to find.

The real link to the free slider is http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/slidedeck2/

cheers, Connie
Reply
rosejacob6 11 years ago
Hello Connie
I completely agree with you, I was also stuck in Slidedeck. Then I found a way to get away from it. That is not good.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-flip-image-free/
Reply
Efren Martinez 11 years ago
Soliloquy Responsive Slider, its amazing the things you can do it with it ! take a look ! http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/soliloquy-lite/
Reply
Armanison 11 years ago
Hello, it’s been a while since I’ve needed any help. I’ve been using your plug in for a long time, have always liked the way it added a customized effect.
Also during my searching I got upon the plugin for WP http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-flip-image-free/
check this
Reply
Rick Adamson 11 years ago
Hi... I'm into blogging too. I'm currently using http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/iframe-embed-for-momentme/... An easy to use plugin that works fast. It creates a 360° perspective of your images. Great for enhancing your web content.
Reply
aliceli 11 years ago
Thank you, great collection…

I also found this one very useful jQuery slider creator and it’s totally free: http://www.hislider.com

It also supports ken burns effect… WYSIWYG & Full-Customise
Reply
wordpress widgets 10 years ago
I downloaded and installed SlideDeck 2 Lite slider. It works perfectly.
I was looking very long time for like this slider.

Thanks.

http://www.wpdeveloper.com
Reply
Alkesh Miyani 9 years ago
There is another best free responsive slider plugin with easy user interface, called “Avartan Slider Lite” and it’s pro version also available.

Checkout this live link – https://wordpress.org/plugins/avartan-slider-lite/

I am using this great plugin on my demo site.

Thanks to plugin owner.
Reply