Configure Slider Autoplay and Create Automatically Rotating Slider

Slider autoplay is popular in web design, you can encounter that kind of slideshow on a lot of websites. This way you can share more content with your visitors and call their attention. The slider switches between slides after a period of time, and you can display other content on each slide. Of course, autoplay should happen after the visitor has had enough time to check it.

How to create autoplaying slider?

You can create autoplaying slider even in the free version of Smart Slider 3, but the Pro version offers more features for you. All you need is to enable the Autoplay on the slider autoplay configuration page and customize it.

You can set a ton of options for example the interval or when it should stop, continue or finish the autoplay. The most common setting is to stop the autoplay when the mouse is on the slider and then continue the autoplay when the mouse leaves the slider. Also, you can pause the autoplay when a video plays in the slider, which function can be useful at video sliders.

In the Pro version you can configure more specific settings, for example with the finish autoplay setting you can set the autoplay to stop after the first slide. You can make an introduction slide with that option, and you can show the actual content after that.

How to stop the autoplay?

Use the autoplay button! As you might already know, you can add multiple different control elements to your slider. One of them is the autoplay button which can start or stop your slider’s automatic sliding.

Please note: If the slider’s autoplay is not enabled, the autoplay button won’t be visible. Of course you can change the design of the Autoplay button easily or you can create your own with the Style Manager.

Indicator for slider autoplay

Autoplay indicator indicates the elapsed time in the current autoplay interval. It is a good feedback when the slider switches to the next slide. You can choose from a pie type and a stripe type indicator. Both of the types have several customization options so you can create your own.

Why should you use slider autoplay?

If you use the same slider on all your pages without autoplay, and the visitors don’t decide to interact with them, they will only see the first slide. This isn’t really good, and this is where the autoplay option can help. If you set a main animation, which attracts the eye, your slides won’t just appear, but they will surely be noticed. Also, this tool is great to make an automatic image viewer, just enable the fullscreen option, and let the images automatically change.

Always give control

There are many different ways of using the autoplay feature, but there is one thing I would suggest: always allow your WordPress or Joomla users to be able to stop and resume the rotation.
If people see something interesting, and would like to take his time to check out your slide, they should be able to do so with at least a mouse enter event.

But you can make a more obvious option, put a pause/play button into your slider with the autoplay control. The autoplay can also be paused by videos, and the lightboxes, as you don’t want your slide to go away while you are watching something.

If you don’t give control to your visitors, it can cause that they choose not to wait for another round, so this can be a deal breaker for example to buy a product or not. It is critical to leave enough time for visitors to read the content on your slider, otherwise they can be frustrated.

To solve this, I would suggest using the autoplay indicator or the autoplay control, and the visitor can control over the automatic slide switching.

Where the controls don’t matter

There can be use cases where the controls don’t matter, and the goal is that the autoplay should never stop. The logo slider can be a good example for that. In this case you can share more information with the visitor at the same time, but the content of the slides aren’t too important, but informative.

However I can suggest letting the basic mouse enter and leave stop/resume autoplay options, and the visitors will feel that they have control over the slider which gives a good experience for them.

Final Thought

When you create an autoplaying slider, you should always take care of the quality of your content. It is good, if you put CTA buttons on your slider, which the visitor can navigate to other pages. What is important is that you should not forget to configure your slider autoplay so that the user has enough time to read it.

Tags: AutoplayTips

About Author

I’m Bernadett Toth and I’m a member of Nextend‘s support team. I have two dogs, in my free time I teaching them. Besides that I often ride a bike, watching movies or reading.