A slideshow can be a great visual tool for a variety of WordPress websites, including blogs, eCommerce stores and photography sites. They can help to grab users’ attention and give visitors greater insight into your website or company.
Let’s look at how you can create useful WordPress slideshows, using either the Jetpack or MetaSlider plugin.
Adding a slideshow to WordPress with Jetpack
Jetpack is known as a solution for WordPress backup, security and speed. However, you may be surprised to learn that you can also use Jetpack to create slideshows in WordPress.
One of the main reasons we chose Jetpack for this tutorial is the development team behind it – Automattic – the same team that develops WordPress. This means that Jetpack is compatible and more secure than other plugins.
Plus, creating slideshows with Jetpack is beginner-friendly, as it’s quick and easy get started.
To create slideshows in WordPress with Jetpack, you first need to enable the slideshow and then add a Jetpack slideshow to a page or post on your WordPress website.
Activating the Jetpack slideshow or carousel is simple. Once the slideshow is enabled, WordPress galleries will display a stunning full-screen view of photos from any standards you have embedded in posts or pages.
In your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find Jetpack > Settings > Write. Scroll down to the “Media” section.
Enable the Show images in a full-screen carousel gallery option. You can also decide whether to show or hide the photo’s Exif metadata and comments area in the image lightbox and change the color scheme of the carousel.
If you activate the function, Jetpack will automatically save the change. This completes the activation of the Jetpack slideshow function. The slideshow option will appear in your block options when you create a post or page. To see it, simply edit or create a post/page, then click Add Block and search for “Slideshow”.
Add Jetpack slideshows to pages or posts
Jetpack offers a slideshow block on all Jetpack-connected sites, allowing you to easily add an image slideshow to a post or page. Search for the “Slideshow” block in the Jetpack block selector and insert it into your WordPress content.
Next, you’ll need to add images to your slideshow. The block contains 3 options you can choose from:
- Drag images from your computer to the slideshow block.
- Click the Upload button and select images from your computer to upload.
- Select images that you have already uploaded from your media library.
Once you have selected your images, click on Create new gallery.
You can drag the images to change their order. You can also add alt texts, titles, captions and descriptions. Once your gallery is ready, click on Insert gallery.
Now you can preview your slideshow directly in the block editor.
If you want to edit the slideshow, simply click on the block to open the block toolbar. It contains many options for which you can customize your slideshow, e.g. automatic playback of the slideshow, adding effects for the slide transitions or setting the image size.
Save or update your post/page and you’re done. Please note that this slideshow only works if you have Jetpack installed.
How to create a slideshow in WordPress with MetaSlider
With over 600,000+ active installs, MetaSlider is another good WordPress slideshow option. The plugin gives you the ability to create a SEO-optimized slider, slideshow, carousel or gallery within minutes.
More than that, the pro version allows you to create many advanced slides, such as animated layer slides, post feed slides, video slides, HTML overlay slides and tons more. MetaSlider ensures that all slideshows created are responsive and SEO-focused.
To create slideshows in WordPress with MetaSlider, you need to install and activate the plugin on your website. After that:
- In the MetaSlide tab in your WordPress dashboard, click Add Slide to open the Media Manager and select “Image” on the left.
- Upload your new images or use existing images in the media library to use them as slides.
- Click on the Add to slider button. The Media Manager pop-up window will disappear and the slides will be loaded into your slideshow.
- Configure your slideshow: On the “General” tab, add the caption and the URL of your slide. If you want the link to open in a new browser window, check the “New window” box.
- Switch to the SEO tab to set the image title and alt text for your slide. While the title text should provide additional information about the slide, the alt text aims to describe the image itself.
- Crop your images on the Crop tab if you find that some of the slides do not have the right focus.
- Click the Add slide button to add more images.
- Click Preview to see how it will look.
- Click the Save button when you are happy with your slideshow.
Conclusion
In this post, we’ve shown you how to create WordPress slideshows using either the Jetpack or MetaSlider plugins.
Jetpack is particularly suitable for simple slideshows, meanwhile MetaSlider offers a variety of slider options, such as images, videos, HTML sliders, etc. It is best suited for e-commerce websites that want to showcase numerous items or photography websites that want to display highly pixelated and SEO-optimized images.
Either way, a plugin is the best way to create slideshows from within WordPress, so take your pick of the best one.
