Why do You Need a Video Slider on Your Website?

Every WordPress website tells a story. The problem is that this story isn’t so interesting for the visitor without a visual impact. No matter how great your website is, if it can’t catch the visitor’s attention, it won’t convert. Web designers love using images to grab attention when they create amazing sites. Images help you tell your story, but they have a big downside: they’re static design elements. While a nice looking image slider does help, a video slider is what’s going to make the biggest impact.

What is a video slider?

A video slider is a slider which contains mostly, or only videos instead of static images. These videos can cover any topic your site can take advantage of. YouTube, Vimeo and MP4 videos are the most popular videos you can find in a video slider.

You can use your video slider to show online lessons, cooking tutorials or user testimonials. Using a video slider instead of a single video has many advantages. You can separate your content to smaller parts, giving the user control over it.

For instance, if you create a video slider to show testimonials, make a video for each testimony. This way your soon-to-be customers can:

• learn how many testimonials you have,
• learn more about those who use your product, and
• watch the videos in the order they prefer.

Why are video sliders so powerful?

The human eye reacts to movement almost immediately. Since videos move, they make the user focus on the video’s content as soon as possible. Additionally, a video is one of the best demonstrating tools at your disposal.

Let’s say you’ve created the best product ever, and you want to show your visitors how great it is. What’s the best way to do so? Add a video to your site where you show this product and talk about it. Even if it’s just a one minute video, it makes a better impact than written texts or images would. Unless your visitors read quickly, they can’t read many words within a minute. But they have no trouble focusing on a one minute video where you can not only talk, but take things visual.

How to find the best video slider plugin for your WordPress site?

The easiest way to add an HTML video slider to your site is to find a great slider plugin. There are hundreds of slider plugins out there, and it’s hard to find the best one. It’s important to figure out what do you need the plugin to do. For instance, where are your videos hosted? Do you use YouTube, Vimeo, or are you planning to host your videos on your site?

If you plan to show videos from YouTube, you need to select a slider which supports that. Customization options are also important features to consider. For example, does it matter to you how your video slider looks? Do you need arrows, thumbnails or other fancy features?

It’s important to find a video slider plugin that suits your needs and your budget. If you don’t have money to spend, it’s important for the slider to have a free version. Smart Slider 3 has an excellent free version, which you can use to create a beautiful video slider. It supports adding videos from Vimeo and YouTube, so it’ll suit most people’s needs. Smart Slider 3 is a great tool to create a stunning video slider without programming skills. In fact offers a drag and drop interface to create your content. Additionally, you can create fully responsive sliders.

How to make a video slider?

Using Smart Slider 3 you can add videos to your sliders easily. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Download and install Smart Slider 3
2. Create a new slider
3. Click on Add slide and select Blank
4. Go to the Slide Editor of your new slide and add a YouTube or Vimeo layer
5. Paste the link of your video to the URL field
6. Adjust the Aspect Ratio if needed.

Where to put my video slider?

Finding the perfect place for your video slider isn’t as easy as it seems. For instance, you can use the video as a hero header. In this case, it’s important to let this video be the first thing the visitor sees on your site. If you have a product to sell, it’s also a good idea to put the video above the fold.

But there are video sliders which are best to remain below the fold. For instance, a testimonial slider would look odd as a hero header. The visitor needs to learn more about the product or service from the author first. They’re only interested in testimonials when they’re ready to buy the product or service.

Create a dynamic YouTube slider

When you decide to add video sliders to your site, usually you need to add all videos one by one. This is a time consuming process if you have many videos. Not to mention you need to replace the videos by yourself if you no longer need them. This all sounds very time consuming in the long run.

Fortunately, Smart Slider 3 Pro has a solution for you: the YouTube video generator. After a quick Google API set up, you can start creating dynamic slides from your playlists. If you put a new video to your playlist it will appear on the slider as soon as the generator’s cache refreshes. If you don’t have a playlist you want to use, you can also create a dynamic slide by searching for a keyword.

Create an automatic Vimeo slider

You can create a video slider automatically from your Vimeo videos as well. All you need is the Pro version of Smart Slider 3 and a Vimeo account. You’ll need to spend a few minutes to set up a Vimeo App, then you can start creating beautiful sliders. Good news are that you only need to set up the app once, then it will work forever, just like the Vimeo generator. Unless you want to change the Album where your videos come from, you won’t need to do anything.

Add video from local source

Hosting videos on 3rd party websites are not suitable for everybody. People who host their own videos don’t depend on a 3rd party website to show the content to their visitors. Self hosted videos don’t have ads, and allow more control.

In Smart Slider 3 there are three ways to use a self hosted MP4 video on your site. You can use this video as a layer, slide background or slider background. Slide and slide backgrounds cover the whole slider, regardless of its size. Unfortunately, layers might not be able to do that on all possible screen sizes. So MP4 video sliders are more versatile than YouTube or Vimeo ones.

How to use video in slider?

Creating a stunning video slider is a challenging task. We’ve gathered the best video slider examples you can easily create using Smart Slider 3. What’s even more, you can import these samples with just a couple of clicks.

Yoga Hero Block

This slider uses a minimalist approach to create an amazing hero slider. There’s a shape divider at the bottom, which covers part of the video background with a white color. This makes the row stand out creating the effect of a broken grid layout.

Vimeo Slider

People like knowing what they get when they interact with any website. Showing the title and a short description of the video they’re going to watch gives them this experience.

YouTube slider

A stunning YouTube slider doesn’t have to have fancy features. A simple, minimalistic slider with thumbnails can do the job, too. Just look at the example above! Visitors can navigate fast and easily and watch the videos in the order they would like to.

Video Block

A full page hero slider is also a great choice to add video to your website. The slider above takes a minimalistic approach with a few lines of text only. The video catches the visitor’s attention, while it has a handy one page navigation at the bottom.

Video Showcase

A showcase slider is not the obvious choice to create a video slider, but it does the job well. This Video Showcase slider, for instance, shows the next and previous videos. The actual video opens up in a lightbox when the visitor choses to view it.

Static Testimonial

Video sliders are great to show testimonials, even if they’re not about the actual testimony. As this example shows, they’re great to support your message with a visual impact.

Conclusion

Smart Slider 3 is the best video slider plugin for WordPress. It lets you create responsive sliders with videos, using a simple drag and drop interface. Additionally, it offers beautiful video slider templates to start with. What more could you ask for?

Tags: VideoVimeoYouTube

About Author

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.