Plugins, Themes

WordPress Parallax Effect Slider plugins

by 8 Responses

You’ve probably seen the Parallax Effect but might not have known what it was (see the demo link near the end of this post).

A typical slider has a static image, movie, text, or some other item. There are options to auto-play, and there are navigation controls. This is all the same for a parallax effect slider, but there are layers of content within each slide that make it look three-dimensional, thanks to CSS3 and jQuery.

Free WordPress Parallax Slider Plugin

Keeping this post to the point, there’s a free WordPress plugin that makes all this fairly easy to do: WP Parallax Content Slider.

The great thing about this plugin is that it provides 2 ways to use it:

  • Auto-generate slides from recent posts, with options for:
    • Number of posts to include
    • Time between each slide
    • Sort order of the posts to display
    • Include/Exclude specified categories
    • Default image for when posts don’t have a featured image
  • Manually add slides
Once you adjust the plugin’s wp-admin settings (screenshot below), you add a PHP code snippet in your theme file where you want it to display. It’s also responsive!
Plugin's wp-admin settings page

If you’re looking to get a bit more customization from the plugin, make sure to reference the plugin’s FAQs and read the included README.txt file. Thanks to this plugin, you can get a nice WordPress parallax effect slider in minutes, not hours.

View a live demo at the plugin author’s own website: jltweb.info

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Premium Alternative

If you’re looking for a plugin with more options, including video slides, you might want to consider the $15 CodeCanyon WordPress plugin LayerSlider WP. I haven’t tried it personally, but it has 5-stars from 170 ratings.

LayerSlider WP plugin - $15 at CodeCanyon

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Comments (8)

    • Thanks for commenting. Both plugins state they are responsive. However, the free plugin’s demo was responsive in my testing, but the paid plugin’s demo was not. Was that your experience? Since the paid plugin says it’s responsive, I imagine it can be turned on or off or report your concerns and the plugin author will provide you a way to make it responsive.

    • Josh, thanks for sharing your experience. Did you have the CodeCanyon preview bar off (if it was the demo page that crashed your iPad Safari)? I just now tried it on my iPad 1 and it didn’t crash with or without the preview bar. I had 6 other Safari tabs open at the time. I will say the animation wasn’t as smooth as with the free plugin. Maybe it’s because of each slider’s content; maybe it is the slider.

    • Nathan, that’s a pretty cool site, but it’s also pretty advanced. There’s nothing I know of that will do that for you. At a glance, it didn’t seem like a site built with WordPress, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done in WP. In my opinion, you’d need to hire someone proficient at jQuery and CSS3 to get a custom site like that.

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