6/3/15 Update: I wrote this review a while ago, but realized today that I had underestimated WP Supersized. I love the plugin anyway, and the only reason I didn’t recommend it in the review below was because I thought I couldn’t set up different sliders for different pages. Today I learned I was wrong. With the simple addition of the NextGEN gallery plugin, you can set up a different gallery per page and use the WP Supersized plugin – which is free! I’m super excited to find this out.
One note here, if you are using WP Supersized with a responsive theme, you might find that the images are squishing on portrait mode. To fix this, find the area in your CSS that says img {max-width: 100%;} and change it to .site-container img {max-width: 100%;} (or whatever your container is called on your site.) This should fix the issue.
Reviewed by Laura Hartwig on .
Wish there were more slider options with a paid plugin
Websites with full screen background images make a big impact, especially with today’s bigger screens. Recently, I had a client who wanted not only full screen images, but a full screen slideshow on the front page and different full screen static images on each page. First I looked at WP Supersized, which seemed to be a great solution, but while this plugin had a great slider – and was free,
The positives: It was really nice to be able to set individual background images, based on page, post, category, etc, and even have one set for “global” so that it would take care of any pages that didn’t have a specific image assigned. The plugin is very easy to install and use. You can manage your background images through the Appearance menu, or to make things even easier, you are able to choose a background image while creating each individual page or post. I loved how easy it was.
The negatives: The reason I chose this plugin was that it also had a slider, but the slider has almost no options and I really didn’t like the way it faded in. To have the slide up there for any length of time, it seemed to make the website begin with a white screen as a “fade in”. I didn’t like that at all. So I ended up using WP Supersized for my home page slider and Full Screen Background Images for the other pages.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this plugin, but as a paid plugin, I would really like to see more options on the slider, similar to what WP Supersized offers for free. I would have given it a higher rating if it was a free plugin, but I expect more when I have to pay.
Rating: 3.0 stars.
You can see these two plugins in use on the site I developed here: Rizzutos.com
Note: WP Supersize causes a conflict with another of my favorite plugins, Easy Fancybox.