Displaying a Super Fast Slider in Breakdance Builder

Adding a fast slider to your website can be beneficial in increasing conversions and engaging your visitors

Justin Gluska

Updated October 17, 2022

website slider with breakdance builder

website slider with breakdance builder

Reading Time: 3 minutes

If you love captivating and engaging an audience, you probably love website sliders. They can increase visitors’ engagement, their retention of information, and increase their initial control when visiting your site. On the other hand, sliders are known to be colossally slow. We've been trying out various sliders for years now: most suck. Popular plugins like Revolution Slider can create stunning visuals, in exchange for loading time that could rival the buffering of an entire Netflix season. So we looked for a middle ground and found it: Smart Slider 3. In addition to speed, pricing was a main concern for us. Slider Revolution costs $99, and Smart Slider has a generous free tier (and only costs $49 for all features).

What is Smart Slider?

Smart Slider is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create beautiful, responsive, and fast sliders for your website. It's easy to use and doesn't require any coding knowledge. The plugin comes with a visual editor, so you can easily create sliders without any coding.

How to Create a Smart Slider?

First, you need to install and activate the plugin. You can find it on the WordPress plugin store for free, where you can install & activate it

Once the plugin is activated, you can start creating your first slider. Go to the Smart Slider menu and click on the "New Project" button. To get the hang of everything, we recommend using a free template. If you're happy with these designs (which honestly look great out of the box), go ahead and customize your slider that way. After playing around with prebuilt templates for a while – it'll be much easier to go ahead and design your own.

new project button in smart slider 3
add slide button in smart slider 3
create new project and start with template options in smart slider 3

Go ahead and pick your favorite template and edit the first slide. Customize this how you want and change images, text, font types, colors, and anything else you can think of. If you want to add more slides, hit the big add sign and continue adding content.

You can customize these images and shapes, as well as the button styles and paragraph text. One of these sliders should probably fit the theme of your website enough to edit the copy, media, and styling to use within minutes.

smart slider 3 content editor dashboard

Adding Smart Slider to a WordPress Page

Now that you've got a beautiful slider, it's time to add it to your website.

3 ways to add smart slider to wordpress website: shortcode, gutenburg/direct, and php

We use the Breakdance Page Builder, but your page builder shouldn't impact the creation of your slider. Once we're done creating our slides, we'll add a simple shortcode to our page.

In our editor, we'll paste the copied shortcode from the Smart Slider dashboard using a shortcode element. When we do, our section width & padding will create a buffer on our page. Go ahead and set your section width to full and change the padding to 0 on all edges – this should fix your problem.

Now What?

And just like that, you're done! Since we're speed-obsessed (and you should be too) make sure to check the loading time of your pages using a tool like GTMetrix. As you could see, the entire slider loads within a second with near-perfect performance and structure scores.

gtmetrix 100% performance and 98% structure report on a page with a slider using breakdance builder

We've used Smart Slider on a bunch of our websites and have never had any loading issues – even with sliders that have over 4-5 slides. We're confident that you'll be happy with the results as well. Hope this helped! What are your favorite ways of using website sliders? Tell us in the comments below!

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Written by Justin Gluska

Justin is the founder of Gold Penguin, a business technology blog that helps people start, grow, and scale their business using AI. The world is changing and he believes it's best to make use of the new technology that is starting to change the world. If it can help you make more money or save you time, he'll write about it!

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