Simple WP Slider

Most WordPress slider plugins treat the carousel as a single global block bolted onto jQuery, with no real per-slide data model and no thought given to layout shift or screen readers. Simple WP Slider treats sliders as first-class content: each one is a named entry in its own custom post type with independent settings, and each slide carries its own alt text, caption, link, and call-to-action. Any slider drops into any page or template with the [simplewpslider id="ID"] shortcode or the bundled Gutenberg block, and the same id can be reused in as many places as needed.

Version 2.0 is a full rewrite that drops Slick, now an archived library, in favour of Swiper.js 11, which removes the jQuery dependency and brings touch support and a real accessibility module. Slides can be Media Library images with srcset and lazy-loading, self-hosted MP4 video, or YouTube/Vimeo embeds behind a click-to-load facade, so nothing is fetched from those services until a visitor actually presses play. Per-slider aspect ratio enforcement (16:9, 4:3, 1:1, or auto) stops the carousel from shifting the page as it loads, and the markup follows the WAI-ARIA carousel pattern with keyboard navigation, keyboard drag-reorder in the admin, and screen-reader live-region announcements from Swiper's a11y module. Upgraders from 1.x aren't stranded either: existing images are auto-imported into a "Default Slider" post and the old bare shortcode keeps rendering it.

It's built for developers who need more than one slider per site and who care about the details a plugin review actually checks: prefixed and sanitised input, escaped output, REST permission callbacks, a real uninstall routine, and no runtime requests to third parties beyond a deliberately gated Vimeo oEmbed call made only from the admin when an editor adds a Vimeo slide.

What it does

Built with