Is it the best WordPress slider plugin?

Is it the best WordPress slider plugin?
Monologue Review Features and Pricing

Wondering if Soliloquy is the right slider plugin for you?

WordPress sliders help you showcase content like images and videos on your website to increase engagement. But Soliloquy takes it a step further by also allowing you to create sliders from existing posts, pages, and custom post types.

In this Soliloquy review, we will look at various aspects of this slider plugin. We focus on usability, features, customization, and more so you can see if it’s right for you.

Importance of sliders

With sliders you can make visually impressive use of the space on the pages without overloading your website. They help users find a lot of information on your website without having to scroll through a page.

This can help you spread your marketing message as soon as the user lands on your website, thereby increasing your conversion rate.

Additionally, sliders can help you with storytelling and increasing your brand awareness. The order in which you place your slides allows you to easily control the narrative. This ensures you share your brand story the way you want.

This allows you to better connect with your audience and build long-term brand loyalty.

Here are more reasons to use sliders on your WordPress website.

  • Content highlighting: Sliders are great for highlighting key messages, promotions, or featured products/services. You can easily place them on the homepage or other important areas of your website.
  • User interaction: Most slider plugins have navigation tools like arrows or pagination points, as well as autoplay options. By doing so, they provide interactive elements that can increase engagement and reduce bounce rates.
  • Call to action (CTA): Sliders can contain clickable buttons or links on each slide that direct users to specific pages or actions. This can increase user interest in your business and improve conversion rates.
  • SEO benefits: Sliders can have a positive impact on your SEO by improving page load times, bounce rates, and user engagement metrics. These are some of the most important factors that search engines consider important for ranking.
  • Visual stimulus: Sliders can make a website visually appealing by presenting multiple images or content in a compact, dynamic way. This can help attract and maintain visitors’ attention.

What’s wrong with most sliders?

The main problem with sliders is that they are too slow. A poorly coded slider can have a significant impact Increase your page load time. As you know, speed is one of the most important factors in SEO. These other sliders can not only harm your website’s SEO but also ruin the user experience.

Another problem is usability. Most WordPress sliders are quite complicated and offer tons of options in a poorly designed interface. You have to fight with the slider to get it right.

As you can see above, sliders can add great value to your website. However, since their primary purpose is to add a lot of content in a small space, you can easily overwhelm your users if you don’t use sliders correctly.

Therefore, you need a reliable, lightweight slider plugin that will help you ensure your users get a great website experience.

Let’s dive into this Soliloquy review so we can help you answer all your questions.

Soliloquy plugin, animation plugins

Self-talk was originally created by Thomas Griffin. He and his team are the same masterminds behind it OptinMonsterthe best email marketing tool, and Envira Gallerythe best WordPress gallery plugin.

Soliloquy is one of the most popular WordPress slider plugins in the official WordPress plugin repository with over 1 million downloads. Since its launch in 2012, Soliloquy has helped bloggers, small businesses, and even Fortune 500 companies create beautiful WordPress sliders.

Why does Soliloquy stand out?

Soliloquy can help you quickly create a slider with its drag-and-drop builder. It includes numerous slider themes and templates to help you get started.

You can create a slider from images like most slider plugins. But with Soliloquy you can also add videos from YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia to your slider. This process is quick and easy as you simply enter the video URL to add this slider plugin. This will create your slider.

Although this is not recommended as it can cause performance issues, Soliloquy also allows you to add self-hosted videos from your WordPress library.

Additionally, you can use Soliloquy to convert your existing posts, pages, and custom post types into sliders. This is a great way to repurpose your content or present it to your audience in a different way. This feature also saves you time when creating sliders manually, ensuring a good user experience.

Therefore, Soliloquy sliders are great for sales pages, landing pages, and even displaying your products from your WooCommerce store.

The best part is that you can combine both videos and images in your slides, giving you the flexibility and creative freedom you need.

Soliloquy Review: Simple and Powerful WordPress Slider Plugin

Soliloquy plugin

Now that you understand it better Self-talkwe will look at different aspects of this slider plugin. We have divided this Soliloquy review into different sections to make it easier for you to understand.

If you would like to read a specific section of this review, simply select one of the links below to jump to that section.

Installation and setup

Now Soliloquy offers both a free and pro plugin. You can start with the free plugin to test the tool and see if it’s right for you.

Monologue Lite can help you create beautiful video and image sliders for desktop and mobile devices. It’s lightweight and won’t affect your website’s performance, allowing you to add high-resolution images and videos to your sliders.

To get Soliloquy Lite, navigate to your WordPress plugin repository and use the search bar to find it. Then install and activate it like any other plugin.

You can also go directly to WordPress.org and download the plugin manually.

Free monologue plugin

If you run into problems, check out this post about installing plugins.

On the other hand, if you want the Pro version of Soliloquy, go to their Pro version official website and select a plan. Soliloquy Pro plugin can help you create PDF sliders, image protection, WooCommerce integration, and more.

This slider plugin offers 4 plans so you can easily get a package that suits your needs and budget.

Regardless of whether you get the free or premium plugin, Soliloquy ensures that installation and setup is easy and quick.

We’ll show you how.

Once you purchase a plan, you will be redirected to the Monologue account Dashboard. Copy the “license key” here overview Tab.

Monologue license key

Then go to Downloads Tab where you will see different downloadable files depending on the plan purchased. Find the plugin download link and save the file to your PC.

You will also see your license key at the top of the page in case you missed it overview Tab.

Monologue download plugin

Now all you have to do is go to your WordPress dashboard and install the plugin.

To do this, navigate to Plugins » Add new plugin to upload and install the plugin. Then activate it like any other plugin. The “Sololoquy” menu option should appear next.

Next, go to Monologue » Settings and paste the previously copied license key. Finally, click on “Confirm key” and you can use Soliloquy.

Monologue License Key Activation

This is a very simple and quick process and should take about 5 minutes.

Adjustment

Although Soliloquy is a lightweight plugin, it has powerful customization options. First below the license key text bar in the Monologue » Setting The page gives you options to customize your sliders.

You can set “New Slider Status” to Publishedwhich will make the slide go live as soon as you click “Published” on the slider builder page. If you set it as Draftallows you to review slides before they go live, giving you the ability to control the slides on your website.

On this page you can also set the New Slide position to After or Before existing slides. This can help you quickly arrange or update your slides to ensure you have more control over the story you want to tell.

Finally, you can position your slides using the “Default View Position” drop-down menu, where you can choose “Grid” or “List.”

Monologue adjustments in Settings

With Soliloquy you can also customize your slider during the creation phase.

This ensures that each of your sliders is unique and fits the purpose of the page. To do this, first go to your slider creation page.

To do this, go to Monologue » Add new and go to the slider settings below the file upload section to find the file configuration.

Here you can set up the slider theme and choose between Base and Classic. You can also set the image size using a drop-down menu and slider dimensions by typing them.

Monologue configurations

To improve the user experience, use a checkbox to automatically crop images in the slider based on dimensions you specify. You can also activate Adaptive heightThis is handy for ensuring that your individual slides adapt smoothly to the slider.

Additionally, you can adjust the Sider position on the page to Center, Left, Right, and None.

If you want to add labels to your slider, Soliloquy allows you to set their position to bottom, top, left, and right. Since the distance between sliders also affects the position, this WordPress slider plugin allows you to manually add the slider bar in pixels.

Monologue slider position

The success of your WordPress sliders is often influenced by the navigation options.

The good thing is that Soliloquy offers many navigation options that you can turn on and off with checkboxes. Additionally, you can also enable or disable navigation completely with a checkbox.

The slider navigation options you can set up here include:

  • Arrows
  • Keyboard navigation
  • Mouse wheel navigation

You can also make your slider loop, start automatically, and add pause/play buttons with checkboxes, making it easy to add slider functionality with Soliloquy.

Self-talk, adjust navigation

With Soliloquy you can now also add slider animations.

For example, as soon as you activate it Autostart sliderallows you to delay the slider transition in milliseconds before it plays automatically.

To make the transition visually appealing, you can add Slider translation and choose between “Hide”, “Scroll horizontally”, “Scroll vertically” and “Ticker”.

By setting up the subtitle transition delay, slider transition duration, and slider transition speed, you can make your slider a truly hands-free experience.

Monologue: Customize slider animation

Since Soliloquy allows you to add videos, you can also customize their appearance in the slider.

For example, you can enable Autoplay Video to start the video as soon as a user lands on the page. However, by activating it you can make the experience more user-friendly Stop while hovering so that the video stops playing when a user hovers over it.

Or activate Pause during navigation so that the video stops playing once the user uses the slider navigation options.

Monologue: Customize video slider

As you’ve seen, Soliloquy makes it easy to customize your sliders. You will mainly use checkboxes and drop-down menus to ensure that even beginners can use this slider plugin.

Ease of use

While reviewing Soliloquy, we noticed that the slider builder looks like the classic WordPress editor.

On the right you will find the “Publish”, “Save” and “Preview” buttons and in the middle the upload area, which is also similar to the WordPress library. Therefore, you will not experience any learning curve while using this slider plugin.

You can also conveniently add different types of sliders in the same place.

External slider for monologue

The upload area has a Native slider Tab that allows you to add videos from your computer or from your WordPress library. You can select multiple files from both your PC and your WordPress library and Soliloquy will add them in the order you selected them.

Self-talk slider builder

Additionally, you can also upload videos using the same upload section.

All you need to do is add the title, video URL, image URL and caption. No need to download and re-upload videos, saving storage space and time.

For SEO purposes, you can add ATL text to your videos to ensure search engines can crawl them. This can also help you promote your videos on other platforms and thus grow your channels.

You also get buttons to manually upload videos and images from your PC.

Add monologue video slide

If you have programming experience, you can use Soliloquy to add HTML slides to your WordPress site. You will get an HTML slide title area and the HTML slide code area for further use.

You can also use an external slider feature to populate your slider with your posts or pages.

Content presented in monologue

Use drop-down menus to determine which of your posts you want to include or exclude from your slider. To provide more details about the page or post you are adding to the slider, you can add the following in Soliloquy Post extract and set the number of words for it.

Additionally, you can convert your post and page sliders into CTA buttons by adding a link to the image and title to direct your users to the post itself. And if you want to increase your click-through rate, you can adjust it Read more text suitable for your audience.

Now, in case the system cannot find or retrieve an image URL for a post, Soliloquy has a solution. You can add the “fallback image URL” which will be used instead if an image URL cannot be found for a post.

This can improve the user experience by ensuring your users always end up on a working page.

Contribution to the topic of “Monologue”.

Once your slider is ready, you can add it to your website in minutes. Use a Soliloquy block or shortcode to add the slider to any page, post, or widget-ready area of ​​your website. This ensures that your sliders are easily placed exactly where you want them.

Add monologue slider with block

Features

As mentioned earlier, Soliloquy is a lightweight plugin built for performance. So how can it offer so many features?

The solution lies in using add-ons. Instead of having a lot of features and cluttering the main plugin, Monologue Addons Make sure you only install the features you want.

To access the following features you must go to Monologue » Addons and install what you need.

Features and add-ons from Monoloquy

1. Thumbnail navigation

As you saw above, Soliloquy offers amazing navigation options. But the navigation feature that stands out for us is the thumbnail navigation, which is especially handy when creating a large slider.

With the Thumbnail Navigation add-on, your users can easily jump to the desired slide in the slider. You can also customize your thumbnail navigation to be below or above the slider to make it user-friendly for your audience.

However, since thumbnails are images, they can easily mess up your slider. This allows you to set the minimum and maximum number of thumbnails you want to display at once.

Thumbnail navigation for self-talk

To top it off, Soliloquy thumbnail navigation is responsive and ensures a great experience for your users regardless of the screen size.

2. LightBox Popups

As mentioned earlier, one of the main purposes of sliders is to add a lot of content in a small section. Even if you organize your slides perfectly, it can sometimes be a little difficult for some people to view them.

Soliloquy offers lightbox popups as a solution. After setting up this add-on, your users can expand the image or video in the slide to cover the entire page. This feature also blurs the background so your users can only focus on the expanded media file.

You can customize your lightbox popup with themes like Base, Classic, Karisma, Metro and Karma. You can also choose to add one Super big Lightbox popup for better user experience. This is particularly useful for video sliders.

If you want to provide more context, you can use Soliloquy to add a lightbox caption.

Monologue lightbox

3. Turn PDFs into sliders

PDFs are a great way to share information and can therefore be effective lead magnets. The only problem with PDFs is that your users have to download them to view them. This additional step may prevent some of your users from accessing the PDF file.

A good solution to this is to use Soliloquy to display the PDF pages. This way, your users can easily access it directly on your website without having to download it.

If you use your PDFs as lead magnets, you can give your users a preview of the content using a slider. This will encourage them to download it, increasing conversion rates.

When you convert your PDFs into sliders with Soliloquy, they retain their original format, fonts, and images. In addition, each PDF page is converted into a slide. This ensures that you do not need to edit the PDF further after converting it to a slide.

Add monologue PDF slider

The best part is that your PDF sliders are responsive so your users can easily view them on any device.

4. Add Instagram images to slider

Soliloquy offers an Instagram add-on that allows you to pull images from your Instagram account and add them to your slider, turning it into a feed.

As a feed, your slider will update every time you add new images to your Instagram account. Additionally, you can add as many Instagram images as you want to your slider. You can also randomize the slide sequence for your users. This ensures your slider is always fresh and makes it easier to handle.

This eliminates the need to manually upload your Instagram images to your WordPress library, saving time and storage space. You can add a caption to any Instagram slider and also add a link to the original post to grow your social media using your website.

Monologue Instagram slider

To ensure that your Instagram page’s high-resolution images do not affect your website’s performance, Soliloquy caches the data every 12 hours.

5. Custom Carousel

Carousels are one of the best ways to organize and display sliders. Soliloquy lets you set up custom carousel sliders that you can personalize their width, height, and image borders.

This slider plugin also makes it super easy to navigate the slides in the carousel. You can set how many images can be displayed in the carousel at the same time. In fact, you can customize how many slides your user moves when selecting the navigation buttons.

Monologue carousel

6. Turn products into sliders

With the WooCommerce integration add-on, you can use Sololiquy to turn your eCommerce products into beautiful, responsive sliders.

This can help you promote a variety of products in a compact, visually appealing format. You can filter products by category, price, availability or other criteria. You can also customize how your products are displayed in the slider. For example, you can have just the image, the image with a title, or a linked excerpt.

Monologue woocomerce slider

7. Image protection

The Image Protection add-on allows you to disable right-clicking in both Slider and Lightbox views to prevent visitors from downloading your images.

This is particularly useful for protecting original content from copying and unauthorized use. It is very easy to activate this feature with Soliloquy. After installing the plugin, protection applies to all new sliders. For older sliders, you have to activate this using a checkbox in the slider settings.

Here are other features you can expect from the Soliloquy plugin.

  • Dynamic sliders: You can create sliders from specific groups of images without having to manually re-upload them. This allows you to easily generate sliders from sources such as folders, NextGEN galleries, testimonials, or images attached to specific posts. All you need to do is write a custom shortcode to specify the content you want in your slider. This shortcode can be added to any page, post, or widget-ready area, allowing Soliloquy to dynamically create the slider.
  • Pinterest Pin It Button: This feature allows you to add Pinterest “Pin It” buttons to your slider images, both in slider view and lightbox view. You can customize the Pin-it button with different colors like gray, red, and white and position the button on any corner of the images. This custom Pin It button allows visitors to easily pin your images on Pinterest. This, in turn, increases the visibility and shareability of your content on this social media platform.
  • Schedule slider: This add-on allows you to display specific sliders or slides for a set period of time by adding start and end dates. This makes scheduled sliders perfect for time-critical promotions such as holiday sales or special offers.

Documentation and support

If you want to know how sliders work, then you’ve come to the right place on the Soliloquy homepage. The site uses sliders to show you the plugin features, testimonials and websites using Soliloquy, making it the perfect hands-on demo.

Now you can access the documentation page from the home page when logged into your Soliloquy account. Or in the footnotes if you don’t have a plan. These dynamic menus ensure that each user receives the options that are most useful to them, improving the user experience.

Documentation of the monologue

Once you select “Documentation,” you will be taken to a page with articles placed on tiles and in different categories. Each of these categories clearly displays the number of articles, has a search bar, and a Most Popular section to give you a quick overview of the documentation.

Self-talk documentation page

When you select one of the tabs, such as Getting Started, you open a page that lists all the items in the category in order. This can help you follow the tutorial step by step so that you don’t get lost or confused. On this page you will also see the most popular items in the category and a search bar.

Each article is well written and includes lots of details and screenshots to ensure you properly understand what to do. But they are also easy to read, so even beginners can understand how to use this plugin.

But what if you still need help after reading the documentation?

If you are not logged into your Soliloquy account, you can only contact the support team via a contact form. This form is simple. All you need to do is provide your contact details, select a topic from the drop-down menu and enter your message to support.

Once you have logged in to your Soliloquy account, you can access support by submitting a ticket under the Support tab.

This ticket form is also simple and already contains the information you signed up with. So all you have to do is check an option in the “How can we help today” section and enter your message in the box below.

Monologue, submit a ticket

In addition, you can also access the documentation of the various add-ons and the Soliloquy plugin in your account. To do this, navigate to the Downloads tab and then select View Documents next to the tool you want to view documentation for.

Self-talk, view documents in account

Prices for self-talk

Prices for self-talk

As mentioned, Soliloquy offers a free plugin that you can use to first test whether this slider plugin is right for you. But you also get 4 premium plans that offer more features.

  • Personal plan: Starts at $19.50 per year and can only be used on one website. You can create unlimited sliders. This plan allows you to customize your sliders to suit your brand using the CSS add-on.
  • Multiplan: Starts at $49.50 per year and can be used on 3 websites. You get everything you get in the Personal plan, plus other features like Instagram sliders, templates, image protection, and more.
  • Developer plan: Starts at $99 per year and can be used on 25 websites. In addition to the features you get in lower plans, you also get lightboxes, carousels, PDF sliders, and more.
  • Lifetime plan: You make a one-time purchase worth $349.50. With this plan, you get additional features like WordPress multisite support, client management, and lifetime updates.

All plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee. We should also mention that prices may vary during special sales periods such as Black Friday, Christmas and New Year.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:

  • Free and premium plans available
  • Simple drag and drop builder
  • Lightweight, does not slow down the website
  • Multiple slider themes
  • Integrated with YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia
  • SEO friendly features
  • Responsive sliders on all devices
  • Support dynamic sliders
  • Turn PDFs into sliders for easy viewing
  • WooCommerce integration
  • Customizable navigation options
  • Add social media feeds to sliders
  • Protect images from downloading

Disadvantages:

  • Limited features in the free plan

FAQs: Monologues Review

Why does the Soliloquy plugin have so many add-ons?

Soliloquy uses add-ons to keep the core plugin lightweight. This approach allows you to install only the features you need. This ensures better performance and customization flexibility without adding bloat to the main plugin.

Is Soliloquy free?

Yes, Soliloquy offers a free lite version that allows you to create simple image and video sliders. However, to access advanced features like lightbox popups, dynamic sliders, and WooCommerce integration, you need to purchase one of the premium plans.

Which is the fastest slider plugin?

Soliloquy is known for its speed and performance. It is designed to be lightweight and ensures that it does not slow down your website. Its efficient coding and performance-optimized features make it the fastest slider plugin on the market.

Can search engines crawl sliders?

Yes, search engines can crawl sliders created with well-coded slider plugins. For example, Soliloquy includes SEO-friendly features like ALT text for images, image captions, and clean HTML markup. These features help search engines effectively index the content within the sliders.

Final verdict

Soliloquy is an excellent choice for anyone looking to add visually appealing and interactive sliders to their WordPress site.

Its ease of use, powerful customization options, and lightweight design make it perfect for beginners and advanced users. It has features like drag-and-drop creation, video integration, and a wide range of add-ons for additional functionality.

Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin stands out as a reliable and versatile slider plugin that increases user engagement without affecting website performance.

The most amazing feature of Soliloquy is its speed. Sliders created with Soliloquy load incredibly quickly. The difference is clearly noticeable and will be appreciated by your users.

We didn’t just stop there; We actually created sliders with the same images using other plugins and ran tests between them. Here are our results:

As you can see in the results above, Soliloquy was the fastest loading WordPress slider in our tests.

Self-talk Loads your cover slide first and then the rest of the slides load asynchronously. Not only is it fast in testing, it feels fast to your visitors too.

Given the plethora of other slider plugins, we found Soliloquy to be a blessing. It’s incredibly fast, has rock-solid code, and a clean interface. It’s definitely one of the most user-friendly WordPress plugins we’ve ever seen.

Well done! We hope you enjoyed reading this Soliloquy review. If you are looking for slider plugin alternatives, here is a list of the 10 best WordPress slider plugins.

Additionally, here are other articles you may want to read.

The first article shows you how to create multimedia sliders in WordPress. The next post lists 6 of the best image optimization plugins. While the last article highlights the best Instagram plugins for WordPress.

With that in mind, we think it rightly deserves the title of the best WordPress slider plugin on the market. We give 5/5 stars! Here is the breakdown of our review results:

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