Revolution Slider for WordPress : A Detailed Review

The Revolution Slider is a premium plugin developed by ThemePunch. The main function of this plugin is to add a slider to your WordPress website.

A slider is traditionally image transitions placed on a banner. Using the Revolution slider we can create sliders with complex image transitions and can also place attractive animations on individual slides.

You can download the latest version of the plugin from codecanyon.

Adding a slider, especially for e-commerce sites, can make it more appealing to visitors. Also the slider feature is particularly beneficial when used for tablets and mobile devices.

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Revolution Slider Interface

The Revolution Slider Plugin interface is easy to use. It comes with simple to follow instructions for its numerous settings. In the latest version, it is good to see that the plugin developers have worked on bettering the interface and it appears neater.

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Revolution Slider Features

The plugin provides several basic settings which could be expected for a slider (although several image slider plugins available do not provide even for these basic features). You can set features such as slider width and height, slider placement, you can control image transition type and speed, image navigation features and navigation interface, etc.

The default background for all slides can be set. Each slide created can also be edited individually.

The main highlight of the Revolution Slider is to add layers to slides which can be made visible along a timeline. Thus not only are slide transitions animated, but individual slides can be animated as well using layers. The plugin allows you to add text, image or videos (link from YouTube or Vimeo) as a layer.

Animation transitions can be set for each layer from the vast list of transitions provided. A link can be added to the layer to any slide in the slider.

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Revolution Slider Pros

• Import/Export sliders: Using Revolution Slider, you can not only create and edit several sliders, but sliders can be imported or exported as well as a simple text file.
• This plugin does not use flash for animation but uses CSS transitions instead. It uses the Greensock Animation Platform (GSAP) to obtain faster results.
• Responsive Layout: The Revolution Slider comes with a responsive layout design feature which is used to dynamically set slider width and height depending on the screen settings on the displayed device. This is especially useful when a slider has to be displayed on a mobile device. Alternately you can set a fixed or custom layout according to your preference.
• Easy to place on a page: When creating a new slider, a short code for it is automatically created (using the slider alias). This short code can be used to easily place the slider in a post or in a widget. Additionally the slider can be placed on the homepage or any other page in your site by changing the theme html.
• Caption animations along the timeline (as mentioned above)
• We can add and edit styles for the layers added
• Alt tags for images: A useful feature, with the latest version, is the ability to add alt tags for the images which you place on the slider (or the background image). This is useful for SEO.
• The slider comes with multi-site and multi-language support.

Revolution Slider Cons

• The site load time is affected when images are present on a slide
• A layer can be linked to another slide, but cannot be linked to a post or page
• You cannot add a common layer to all the slides in a slider
• Slide cannot be copied from one slider into another
• Some premium 3D transitions do not work with IE9 (not necessarily a con but could be a problem for few)

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Hints:

Instead of changing the theme file to add the slider in a page (when using the slider alias) , it would be better to create a child theme and add the slider there for a page. Thus ensuring that even if the parent theme is updated your slider would still be in place.

You can use a simple photo editing plugin for example, Simple Photon Photos, to adjust image features like size, brightness, contrast, dynamically before adding an image to a slide.

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Conclusion

There are many image slider plugins available but Revolution Slider definitely stands above and is a great choice to add a slider feature to your website.

Sure its a premium plugin which you will have to buy, but compared to other similar plugins it comes with numerous settings which can be used to set detailed preferences.

Personally for me, the pros outweigh the cons.

Do let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.