Sliders are super versatile design tools. In fact, you can use them for almost any purpose on your site. Additionally, they fit into any page of a WordPress website. For example, you can create a hero slider or display your products on your homepage. Furthermore, it’s easy to combine sliders with page builders. In fact, you can create a gorgeous slider in Elementor as well.
Why do you need an Elementor slider?
Sliders are one of the best tools at your disposal to make your site more attractive to your visitors. Here are some reasons to use a slider on your Elementor website.
Sliders are interactive. Sliders can bring interactivity to your website. Instead of using standard arrows for navigation, you can use CTA buttons. As a result, visitors can explore your content at their own pace. Additionally, using CTA buttons as navigation can enhance the user experience.
They make websites stand out. Sliders are full of cool effects that help your website stand out from the crowd.
They highlight new content. Sliders are typically used to showcase the latest blog post or new products. So when visitors look at them, they automatically assume they promote something new.
Sliders save space. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitor with a website crowded with information. If you have lots of content and use proper white spaces, your pages will be long. However, if you use a slider, your content needs less vertical space, so it’s more comfortable to browse. Furthermore, you can leave appropriate white space around your content. As a result, the page won’t be too long and uncomfortable to scroll through.
They help deliver the wow factor. You want your visitors to spend more time on your website, and to keep coming back. Sliders in 2020 are full of potential wow factors to help you achieve this goal. For one thing, they have cool effects, like Ken Burns or Parallax. Additionally, you can use them to create cool designs, like the broken grid layout.
How to add a slider in Elementor?
If you are wondering how to create sliders in Elementor, then the good news is that there are many ways to do it. For example, you can use the Pro version of Elementor, which has its own slider widget. In fact, it lets you create great-looking, responsive, but rather basic sliders for your site. There are only three layers you can add to your Elementor slider: a heading, a text and a button. Additionally, they can only be in fixed places, which doesn’t give much space for creativity.
In short, the Elementor slider is great but limited. So if you are looking for a slider, which helps you unleash your creativity, you need a slider plugin. In fact, there’s one plugin I can recommend you to look at: Smart Slider 3.
What is Smart Slider 3?
Smart Slider 3 is the fastest-growing slider plugin on the market. Its free version has more than 900k active installations, so it’s super popular. One of the reasons for its fame is that Smart Slider is super easy to use. Additionally, it has all the features you’d expect to find to create interactive sliders. Furthermore, it offers you unlimited possibilities to create visually stunning sliders and blocks.
Slide Editor in Smart Slider 3
Creating a slide with Smart Slider is super easy. You just need to drag a layer to the canvas and style it the way you want. It’s super simple and it’s just like working with Elementor’s widgets. Don’t believe me? Smart Slider has an excellent free version you can try on your own site.
Why should you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor?
Smart Slider 3 is the best WordPress slider plugin. So it’s the perfect choice for creating Elementor sliders. In fact, there are many reasons you should use Smart Slider 3 and Elementor together.
Smart Slider is easy to use. Creating content in Smart Slider is very much like working with Elementor. So, if you can use Elementor, you’ll be able to use Smart Slider 3 as well.
It’s seamlessly integrated to Elementor. Smart Slider 3 has its own Elementor widget for easy publishing. Additionally, you can see the sliders you have made while you’re editing the page with Elementor.
Your sliders are responsive. Using Smart Slider you can create sliders that look great on mobile devices.
You can build anything you want. Unlike the Elementor slider widget, Smart Slider 3 doesn’t limit what you can build. In fact, you can add as many layers as you want. Additionally, you can freely change the order of the layers.
It helps you deliver the wow factor. Smart Slider has spectacular effects which you can use to amaze your visitors. In fact, using Smart Slider you can enrich your slider with popular effects like the Ken Burns, Parallax or Particle effect. Additionally, you can create interesting sliders if you add animated Shape dividers.
It helps you save space. You can use sliders to save space on your website by grouping similar content inside. For example, if you sell products, you probably have a testimonial section on your site. But this section can be long if you don’t use a slider to display the testimonials. But if you create a testimonial slider instead, you can display them on a smaller space. Additionally, you can make the slider interactive and have visitors browse it at will.
The new way to build a Slider
Next generation visual editor, customizable animations & effects, and access to hundreads of premade templates.
Drag and drop a Smart Slider 3 widget where you want the slider to show up.
Select your slider.
Save the page.
As you can see from the steps above, using Smart Slider 3 with Elementor couldn’t be simpler. After you created your slider, just add a new slider widget and select the slider you have made. It’s easy, fast and convenient.
Elementor slider examples for inspiration
Are you still not convinced that you need an Elementor slider on your website? Here are a bunch of slider templates that you can use in Elementor. All samples have been created with Smart Slider 3 and you can import them with one click. Let these gorgeous sliders inspire you to create something stunning for your website!
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Homepage sliders
A stunning slider on your home page can help you grab the attention of your visitors. Typically, they use beautiful imagery and stunning effects for that. But one of the most important purposes of a homepage slider is to capture the attention of visitors. For example, to get them to learn more about your product or services using a CTA button.
This slider is the perfect way to tell what your business is about. It features a CTA button on the first slide, which brings up the services of your business when clicked. As a result, your visitors can explore what you offer in an interactive way.
What makes this slider perfect for your home page? First, it displays information about you with really cool effects. Second, it has two CTA buttons visitors can click on. Both buttons navigate within the current slider, saving vertical space. The first button takes the visitor to a slide where they can learn more about your work. The second button takes them to the contact slide.
If your website’s primary focus is to get more customers, you want to grab the attention of the visitors fast. This full-page slider can help you with that because on its first slide, it introduces you. Additionally, there are two slides where you can show off your work. Then on the last slide, you can display contact information, so visitors can reach out to you with ease.
Full-page slider
Vertical navigation
Cool effects
Hero Headers
A hero header is a trendy design element that typically contains a heading, an image and a CTA button. Smart Slider helps you create stunning hero headers for your Elementor website.
There’s so much going on in this hero scene, which makes it perfect to introduce your website. For example, it has a place for your site’s logo. Additionally, it has a small menu, so it’s ideal to help visitors navigate on your site. The layers have a nice parallax effect, which is perfect to make your website stand out from the crowd.
Hero headers are suitable to appear on many different pages of your site. Although most people only use them on their home page, they look great in contact and about pages, and even in a post. The Security Block template is one of the hero sections which you can use in a post.
Navigation
Subtle layer animation
About us sliders
One of the most important pages of your website is the About us page. You can tell visitors about your business, which helps to build trust. Additionally, the About us page gives you a change to introduce your business and your team as well.
Showing off your team members in an exciting way can be challenging. But this Team Slider is here to bring you a perfect way to show off your team. It lets you display the photo, name and position of each member. Additionally, you can introduce them and write about their role in your company. Furthermore, each person can write a personal quote.
This slider helps you introduce your business in an interactive way. Your visitors can explore your business using arrows or the CTA button on each slide.
Autoplay
Navigation with CTA buttons or textual arrows
Cool hover effects
Ken Burns Effect
Post Sliders
Creating a post slider can bring more attention to your blog posts. That’s why most serious bloggers have some kind of post showcase on their latest content.
First, let’s start with a more traditional looking post slider. It shows up to 3 posts at a time. It uses the featured image of the post as the background of the slide. Additionally, it displays useful information about the post, such as its title, date, author and excerpt. Furthermore, there’s a nice bullet navigation at the bottom of the slider.
Although post sliders generally display more post slides at the same time, showing a single slide has its own advantages. First, it helps the visitors focus on the post, as there aren’t other slides to distract them. Second, showing one slide at a time allows you to display the featured image in its full size for visitors to enjoy. Third, there’s more space to display the content of the posts.
This slider is perfect for creating a post, product or even a team slider. It features a large image, which could be a featured image of the post or a picture of your team member. There’s also a place to display information about the post.
Broken grid layout
Shape divider
Reveal animation
Product Sliders
Webshops like to use product sliders to increase visitor engagement. Typically a product slider shows the most popular or latest products of the store. Obviously, both usage has its own advantages. For example, showing the most popular products can save the time of visitors, as they don’t have to search for them. However, your latest products can get more attention if you feature them in your slider.
A product slider is the perfect choice to showcase your WooCommerce products. This carousel is a great choice because of its look, as it displays three slides. In fact, visitors are familiar with these traditional product slides. So they’ll enjoy seeing one on your website.
Shows another product image on hover
Displays the name, price and category of the products
When people hear the word “product slider”, they think of traditional carousels, which show 3-4 slides next to each other. The Top 5 Products slider isn’t like these traditional sliders. In fact, it’s a full-page slider that displays one slide at a time. So it helps to make your products more memorable. It features two CTA buttons: one to buy the product and another to display its details in the slider.
Interactive
It’s full-page, which gives a fresh look
Displays a single product at a time
Video sliders
Video sliders help you tell your site’s story with audio and visual tools. Additionally, they’re great to help you sell your product or services. Also, you can use a video slider to show learning materials or even user testimonials. In Smart Slider you can add YouTube, Vimeo and MP4 videos to your slides.
The Video Showcase slider is the perfect choice for creating resource materials. It shows an image from the video, and also its title and description. As a result, the viewer can get an idea about the video before clicking on it. The video itself plays in a lightbox, which helps to focus on it, as everything else is darkened.
If you host your videos on YouTube and create a YouTube slider, you might not want to the videos in two places. As a matter of fact, Smart Slider 3 has a cool feature to help you with that. You can create a dynamic slide based on your YouTube playlist. In other words, the new videos you add to the playlist appear in the slider automatically.
The video pauses when visitors scroll away
Thumbnail navigation that shows the cover image of the video, and its title
Testimonial sliders
Testimonials are powerful tools to increase the credibility of your business. Potential buyers won’t believe everything you say, but they’ll believe other people like them. So when you sell products online, it’s important to show testimonials. The word of other users helps to turn your hesitant visitors into customers. In other words, people who check out your testimonials will more likely spend money in your store.
Sliders are great to show testimonials because they help saving space. Additionally, you can create interactive testimonial sliders that visitors will love to explore.
This modern-looking Testimonial Carousel displays up to 3 testimonials at a time. As a result, it takes less time and clicks to go through your testimonials. Furthermore, the single background color gives a modern look to the slider.
The background image of this slider is set for the slider. The slides themselves have no background, so the picture of the slider is visible. As a result, when visitors want to see a different testimonial, they’ll see the slide content move. But the background will stay there, without any movement. Because of this, the slider looks more interesting and eye-catching. In fact, with a slider like this, you can be sure you’ll stand out of the crowd
Displays 1 testimonial at a time, which helps to focus on it.
Has a static background image.
Company logos are used for navigation.
Final Thoughts
An Elementor slider can help you make your website more memorable. Sliders let you create interactive content, in which visitors will browse with joy. In fact, Smart Slider 3 is the best slider plugin to help you create such amazing sliders for Elementor. Additionally, it offers many great samples you can start with.
What are you waiting for? Create interactive Elementor sliders and wow your visitors immediately!
Hi, I’m Ramona and I’m a member of Nextend‘s awesome support team. You’ve probably chat with me if you’ve submit a support ticket. When I’m not answering support emails I read a book or go cycling. I enjoy writing as well, both for our blog and for my private projects.
