Slider plugins are useful for displaying a series images on the screen or grabbing attention with well designed animated sliding interface. There are multiple slider plugins available for WordPress and one of the most popular is Slider Revolution. It comes with various features, such as transition and animation effects. It also allows us to manage layers and multiple timelines for each slide. When done correctly, it is possible to produce professional and beautiful slideshows. Here is a Slider Revolution WordPress plugin review based on our usage.
Related: LayerSlider plugin review.
Bundled Versus Independent Plugin
Almost all popular WordPress themes sold in themeforest offer Slider Revolution plugin bundled with the theme. But in most cases the bundled plugin will not have all features like a premium independent plugin. For example, Slide Revolution bundled with Highend theme will not have video whiteboard add-on or premium template library.
So if you want to have the complete features then go for the premium independent version. And, in this article we explained the features of the independent plugin offered in Envato’s codecanyon marketplace. Note, there is also a jQuery version of this slider available for general usage outside WordPress.
Pricing
Fully featured Slider Revolution with regular license is available for $29 in codecanyon. The extended license is available for $150, which permits you to bundle the plugin with a theme that you sell. After you purchase the plugin, the support lasts for 6 months, which can be extended to 12 months for $9.
Though the pricing looks high the plugin comes with packed up features. Also the pricing includes lifetime free update from the developer ThemePunch.
Summary of Features
Here are various features of Slider Revolution plugin:
- Fully responsive with hundreds of predefined templates to start with.
- Free objects library to use on your slides.
- Visual drag and drop builder to quickly create slider.
- List of add-ons like video whiteboard, coming soon mode, parallax effects and website templates from Themeplicity.
- Multiple content source feed with media support.
- Good performance not impacting speed.
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Templates
Slider Revolution comes with many pre-built slider layouts, so you can choose the most suitable one. This can save you a lot of time instead of creating sliders from scratch. Just import the template you like and start building your sliders quickly.
You will also get a free object library containing background images, font icons, SVG and transparent PNG objects. This will help to easily insert professional looking objects on your slides. The latest version of the plugin includes website templates from Themeplicity to create one pager presentation sites.
Visual Editor
For many website owners, writing codes can be quite complex. Slide Revolution has a WYSIWYG editor that includes drag and drop functionality. It will be easier for you to create new layouts and customize built-in slider templates.
Slider Revolution allows users to become more creative with the presentation of the slider. There are various custom settings that you can choose, such as selecting slider delay, creating custom slider location, adding transitions and adding media layers. You can do this by using the drop-down list.
There is also navigation designer to customize the navigational style with arrows, bullets, tabs and thumbnails.
Responsive Layouts
One of the biggest problems with slider plugins is the responsiveness on smaller devices. Slider revolution fully supports responsive design. The inclusion of various slider layouts should make the designer’s life easier. You can choose carousel, single or standard slider. You can also choose different layouts like auto, full width and full screen.
- Auto: If the auto layout setting is selected, you can use an exact pixels value for the slider size. You can also configure other options, including slider sizes for different screen width. If the default setting is selected, the slider will be stretched based on the width of the main container.
- Full width: If this layout is selected, the full width of the slider stretches across from right to left. However, you still need to define the value of the slider height.
- Full screen: If this layout is selected, the slider fills the whole screen regardless the size of the display. For better impact, you can use this layout to add full screen sliders in videos.
Customizing Options
It’s easy to create custom sliders with the Slider Revolution plugin. You can choose navigation arrows, set slide delays, add parallax backgrounds, set custom fonts, add media layers, add margins, select slide transitions, insert buttons and others. You can do all of these using the drop down menus. With Slider Revolution, you can customize almost everything. In order to save time, you can save presets to reuse layer animations, slide transitions and font styles.
Slider Revolution Easy to CustomizeOther than combining jQuery animation and CSS3, Slider Revolution also comes with 3D parallax effect, which could take the website to an entirely new level. You can make charming interactions or create a panorama view that appeal to many visitors.
Slide Variations
You can create simple and complex sliders showing layers, transition effects and animations with timing. In addition, there are many content sources that you can choose when creating the slider. The Slider Revolution plugin supports various content types, such as current post, specific posts and blog posts. In addition to posts you can also use social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or Instagram. We believe this is more than sufficient for site owners to create any type of sliders.
With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can easily add videos, images, links and text. You can immediately make information-rich slide that everyone can use.
Performance
Slider Revolution has advanced features to automatically load the files only when required. Also the lazy loading and SEO optimizations will help to make your site SEO friendly with loading the images when required.
But remember, when you add too many graphical elements, it is possible that the slider becomes too bulky. In high traffic websites, the load time can be longer, because the server needs to work harder to render the user interface. So ensure to use optimized images and limited animation features and test the speed of your site after implementing the slider.
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Security
Well, you may wonder why we have this section here. If you are following the WordPress security world you might have come across the vulnerability caused by Slider Revolution plugin few years back. You can get the complete details of the security issue from Sucuri blog criticizing the way ThemePunch handled the issue.
Now ThemePunch is taking the security seriously and use third party company called Dewhurst Security to regularly audit the plugin.
Technical Support
Slider Revolution comes with plenty of documentation. It’s easy to get started with Slider Revolution with the extensive availability of documentation. Even people with minimal technical knowledge can seamlessly create fully functional sliders with the tutorials.
The developer, ThemePunch, has active social media presence and you can also subscribe to their newsletters. ThemePunch allows customers to submit support tickets to discuss and resolve any issue. At the moment, the development team doesn’t receive phone calls and live chat from customers.
Summary
371K people purchased Slider Revolution plugin. So undoubtedly this is one of the best slider plugins for WordPress. The plugin comes with features like object libraries, website templates, whiteboard video creator which are beyond the scope of any traditional slider plugin. So id you need end to end slider plugin then go for Slider Revolution without second thought. On the flip side, you may need sometime to get used with the slide editor to quickly create or customize sliders. Also you should think twice whether you need all these features before purchasing the plugin. If you only need few sliders on your entire site then probably one of the free sliders from WordPress repository is sufficient for you.
Pros
- Large number of options with pre-built layouts.
- Easy to control the slider on desktop and mobile.
Cons
- Slider plugins will create thumbnails and reduce the site speed in general, though Slider Revolution has an option to control the loading of plugin resources.
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