Royal Slider has been a popular premium slider plugin for a long time, and the all-new version of the old favorite is a good option for your WordPress sites. It is fully responsive, gives you the ability to add multiple animated HTML blocks, and has almost a dozen templates for adding things like thumbnail navigation, deep linking, video, and more.

Adding Slides with Royal Slider

Right from the start you’re greeted with a unique options panel, giving you a choice of 5 different sliders ranging from custom front page sliders to in-post sliders and even sliders that pull directly from your site content.

Once you’ve made a slider type choice, you’re then presented with almost a dozen templates which control the style and function of your slider. The choices range from a default slider with transition arrows, to sliders with image thumbnail navigation, and even a slider that displays inside a Macbook-like laptop image (for product sales sites).

Royal Slider Options Panel

The slider’s options panel is neat and efficient, letting you control most of the important settings with just a few clicks.

There are several highlights among the settings which set Royal Slider apart from the competition:

• Complete control over image dimensions and whether the images crop or scale, or neither
• Complete thumbnail image dimension control without needing to make css changes
• More than 20 different settings for thumbnails, bullets, arrows, and tab navigations
• Full screen slider options
• HTML markup editor for very granular fine tuning

Some sliders make it incredibly easy to edit options and tweak every angle of your slider’s CSS, but forget to make it easy just to add slides. Royal Slider’s add slide panel is delightfully simple though.

You’re asked for an image, a title, a description, link, and a video link – if you plan to add that functionality.

No messy slider options panels to complicate slide additions, and no fussy caption blocks to add yet either. “Just the Facts” as Joe Friday would have said, and nothing to get in the way.

Editing Individual Slides

When you are ready to add things like captions and HTML Blocks, you can click the appropriate tab on the add-slide panel, and those displays are opened up for you.

The HTML blocks panel shows you a larger version of your slide image, which makes placing HTML blocks directly on the slide easier than some similarly priced premium sliders.

Here, you have the option to add HTML snippets and captions, and then choose CSS options which change the style of your blocks, and also animation effects, which determine how those blocks might slide in or appear on your slides.

There is a handy button which allows you to add your own CSS classes and blocks to better match your own site’s style. Drag and drop functionality also helps with more exact placement of the images and blocks within your slides.

Where Royal Slider Excels

Perhaps the nicest feature of Royal Slider is how it handles video. Whether you use the full screen slider, thumbnails, or side-tabbed text navigation – the Royal Slider sizes your video perfectly and places it into a nice container for viewing. It also does a great job of handling stop, pause, and start functions within a video slide-show – an advanced feature lost on some inferior sliders.

Developers will love the “edit markup” feature which actually allows you to edit the HTML structure of the slider.

This is very handy for custom theme developers who like to fine-tune their slider setups. It’s also great for those who use theme frameworks like Genesis or Thesis, or designers who use Bootstrap themes – which require specific markup for some functions to work.

Responsivity is smooth, and not based on break-points that you enter in options or code. Therefore, it adjusts quickly to nearly any screen dimension.

Where Royal Slider Needs Some Work

The HTML block editor has some great functionality, but I prefer a full slide view for caption placement because it gives you a better understanding of what the finished slide will look like without having to constantly preview it on the page. This is something Slider Revolution handles a bit better.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, the Royal slider is a great addition to the ranks of premium responsive sliders. The ease with which you can create slides and add them to your content or templates is refreshing, and the simplified options panel strips away the fluff – making it easier for novices to add clean-looking sliders to nearly any theme style.

To view a live demo of the Royal Slider or any of it’s 10 working templates, visit the official Royal Slider demo page.