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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Love sliders?
Then you’ll love this collection of the top slider WordPress themes (all 100% free).
In this post, you’ll find a variety of templates that serve different niches. Whether you want to start a blog, an eCommerce store, or an online magazine, you’ll discover a theme with a suitable slider here.
We were careful not to include just any theme, so keep reading to find out how we made our top picks.
Want to see some paid alternatives? Visit our premium slider WordPress themes collection before you go. You’ll probably like our slider plugins list too.
Free themes with sliders
Every theme listed here has five-star reviews from its users. All of them also include a built-in slider, mobile-friendly designs, and a nice assortment of additional customization options.
Here are my top picks for best slider WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Startup Blog by Compete Themes
Theme Description
If you want to create a modern website for an app, tech blog, or startup then you can’t go wrong with Startup Blog.
This vibrant and responsive WordPress theme comes with a built-in slider. The demo and screenshot above show off a series of pages in the slider. You can select exactly which pages from your site you want to include. Furthermore, you can choose to display your most recent posts or posts from a specific category instead if you prefer.
Startup Blog adapts beautifully to all screen sizes and is mobile-friendly. It’s also search engine optimized for growing organic search traffic, and it loads extremely fast thanks to the performance optimized codebase.
2. Knight by ThemeinWP
Theme Description
With the Knight slider theme, you can make a gorgeous and bold website for your writing. Thanks to its clean style and responsive design, it’s an excellent theme for writers, authors, and magazines.
The slider that comes included in Knight is extremely crisp. It can autoplay so it cycles through your posts without requiring any visitor interaction. This can help encourage visitors to navigate through the slider themselves and the animations also help make the page feel more alive.
You can also feature your top post categories above your most recent posts. Add an “About Me” widget to the sidebar along with a newsletter optin and advertisements to help monetize your content. Knight also supports post formats which makes it a great multimedia theme for publishing audio and video content.
Overall, Knight is an awesome magazine theme and comes with a fantastic slider. Click the link below to see what else it can do.
3. Glaze Blog Lite by Perfect WP Themes
Theme Description
Use Glaze Blog Lite to create an extraordinary blog on any topic. The versatile minimalist design makes it suitable for niches from travel to nutrition and fitness.
The post slider featured on the homepage has a unique look and allows you to highlight multiple posts at once. The arrow navigation on the sides makes it easy for visitors to sort through your top posts. Of course, the latest posts listed right below keep it easy for additional posts to get found too.
Glaze Blog Lite has SEO-friendly code and loads fast on all devices. You can switch between a fullscreen and boxed layout easily from the Customizer, add social sharing buttons, and easily switch the site color scheme. Overall, it’s an excellent blog theme and a good choice for any content creators who want a slider on the homepage.
4. VW Ecommerce Store by VW Themes
Theme Description
Maybe you don’t want to start a blog. Ecommerce is huge right now and the VW Ecommerce Store theme has a beautiful design complete with a responsive homepage slider.
This slider theme is perfect for sharing your biggest sales and promotions with your visitors. The homepage is the most sensible location on your site to include this info, and most of your visitors will find it handily. You can include your top product categories, featured products, and more on the homepage too.
Like the majority of eCommerce WordPress themes, VW Ecommerce Store integrates with the WooCommerce plugin. You get a professional-quality integration with the world’s most popular eCommerce solution which makes creating and managing a small store simple.
5. Bard by WP Royal
Theme Description
Create a beautiful and minimalist website with the Bard blogging theme. The spacious layouts and clean typography look awesome on all devices. This aesthetic is sure to improve readership across your demographics.
Of course, we couldn’t include Bard in this collection without mentioning the image slider. Since this is primarily a blog theme, Bard’s slider is used to highlight your best posts. The slider’s prominent position at the top of the homepage makes it extremely effective for driving traffic to specific posts on your site.
Bard has some great advantages. It is translation-ready so it can be used for any language. Plus, it supports RTL languages serving to further increase the audience you can reach. There’s a custom logo, Instagram slider widget, footer menu, and full-width custom header image.
Which slider theme is best?
Startup Blog should be the first theme you consider, especially if you are starting a tech or business blog.
For an eCommerce theme with a slider, VW Ecommerce Store will be perfect.
Any of the other three themes can work well for a blog, and Knight stands out as an especially clean option for magazines.
Post in the comments section if you have questions about any of these free slider WordPress themes.
