If you run a news website or online magazine, or you simply publish new content on a regular basis, one of the best ways you can display your latest content is with a news slider.
A news slider lets you maximize space when you’ve got limited room to display breaking news above the fold. Even better, modern post sliders can automatically generate dynamic content as it’s published so your news slider will always feature your latest articles.
In this post, we’ll explore what news sliders are, benefits and features to look out for in a slider plugin, along with plenty of examples to inspire your own news slider.
What is a News Slider?
A news slider is a type of slider or carousel designed to showcase news, articles, or blog posts. Usually, content sliders will feature three or more articles. Each slide will include a featured image and title, which you can click to read more.
Modern sliders have the ability to generate dynamic content. This means that when you publish a new post on your WordPress site, your news slider will automatically update to include your latest post. This is a great feature if you want to ensure your homepage is always up-to-date with fresh content without the need to manually update carousels.
With Smart Slider 3, for example, you can easily set up a dynamic magazine slider that automatically pulls in content from your latest post. That means you can focus on publishing great content without having to worry about updating your slider.
The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
News sliders are a useful tool for publishers, not to mention a design tool you’ll often see across news and magazine websites. The benefits include:
Dynamic content – The biggest benefit of news sliders is the ability to showcase dynamically generated content. This means your magazine slider will always feature fresh content from your WordPress site, and you won’t have to manually update it.
Maximize space – Just like a real-life broadsheet newspaper, there isn’t much room above the fold when it comes to websites. With a news slider, you can showcase your top stories in the most space-saving, efficient way possible.
Help readers focus – Magazine websites can get pretty cluttered when there are so many articles to read. A news slider lets you display 1-3 articles at a time so you can help reader focus on your most important stories.
Appealing visuals – Images naturally complement news stories because readers want to see the action!
Clear calls-to-action – With clear CTA buttons on your slides, you can direct readers to click-through to read your articles in full.
What Features Do News Sliders Have?
Surprisingly, the most popular news slider solutions involve coding jQuery plugins or cobbling together solutions with AJAX, HTML and CSS. While these solutions might be viable options for developers, there are several features that you’ll only find in modern slider tools like Smart Slider 3:
Dynamic content – Whether you want to automatically display your latest news items or articles from an RSS feed, you can do it with a news slider.
Post sliders – Showcase your latest posts from your blog, including custom post types.
SEO-friendly – If you choose to use Smart Slider 3, any text you add to your slide layers will be search engine crawlable.
Accessible – Modern slider tools like Smart Slider 3 meet the latest (WCAG) 2.0 requirements, ensuring your news slider is accessible for anyone.
Responsive – It’s important to have a responsive slider that looks great on any screen, including mobile devices and fullscreen on desktops.
Customizable – With Smart Slider 3, you can completely customize your news slider, including the size of your slide, the placement of images and text, and even the background, colors, and meta information.
Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!
Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.
No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.
7 Examples of News Sliders
Let’s take a look at some examples of multi-use news sliders to inspire you.
This beautiful news slider design lets you display three dynamically generated WordPress articles at a time. Readers can scroll left or right to see more. The text overlays provide title, date, author, description, and category information, with a slight blue underneath that helps the words “pop.”
This simple post carousel features brief descriptions together with the title so you can get a nice summary of the article before clicking through to read the full post. This carousel design lets you sit two posts next to each other with eye-catching images. The dot navigation underneath lets readers know how many sliders there are to scroll through.
This stunning full-width slider design is ideal for sites that share travel-based news items. The full-width background lets you display images in full (JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, etc), while a break-out box lets you display a title, description and CTA to read more.
This simple, responsive design looks great on tablets — readers can easily swipe left and right to view other slides. The thumbnail images, categories, titles, and descriptions provide readers with information about the news items.
A magazine slider is a popular way to show your featured news. With that layout you can display more news with the group result setting on one slide at a time. You can easily put the featured image, the category, the post title, and the author of your 4 latest news. But if you would like to show other values, you can choose from a lot of variables.
Showcase your articles and grab your visitors’ attention to your magazine website! At a showcase slider you can show multiple slides together. The active slide is in the middle, but you can display the previous and the next slides as well. If you click on the non-active slides, the slider switches to that slide so the visitor can check its content. This is a nice and convenient way to encourage the visitor to check more news.
A post slider in a carousel is a great opportunity to cheer up your website. The shape divider gives a movement, and the colorful sections make your slider come alive. Feature the important news with this carousel and use it on your magazine homepage.
Wrapping Up
No matter what kind of news content you publish on your site, a news slider can help you display it in a highly visual and easy to access way. What’s more, you can showcase your latest articles items above the fold efficiently, ensuring that readers don’t miss any breaking news.
With Smart Slider 3, you can create responsive news sliders that pull in dynamic content from your WordPress or Joomla site, or even from an RSS feed. That means your post slider will automatically update every time you publish a new article on your site.
Do you have a news slider on your site? If you have any questions about using news sliders, let us know in the comments below!
Raelene Morey is the Chief Bird at Words By Birds , an agency that helps WordPress businesses make better content. Computer science grad turned newspaper journalist and ex-managing editor at WPMU DEV. Raelene has been developing WordPress sites for over 10 years.
