WordPress Parallax Effect Slider plugins

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!

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

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.