14 Best CSS Sliders For Better UX 2023

Comprehensive list of the best CSS sliders to speed up mobile-friendly website and app development.

Developers spend time on their computers for days, trying to find new ways to deliver effortless content experiences through their web designs. CSS, HTML, and JavaScript play major roles in the evolution of web design. Without inventing new ways to present content (but not forgetting the growth of each language), we’re risking getting stuck in repetitive patterns that slow the web down, instead of speeding it up. CSS has certainly grown as a web styling language. Nowadays, you have preprocessors that act more like functional languages. That makes room for diversity and flexibility to create libraries and scripts that the browser would natively understand. An emerging CSS trend is CSS sliders that need no external help from jQuery or JavaScript to achieve a smooth sliding effect for any type of content; static or dynamic.

This is possible because of CSS transforms and animation functions that are now widely used in every aspect of front-end web development. With some practice (and certainly patience), achieving a solid sliding effect that will seem like a traditional jQuery implementation without prior inspection is possible. We’ve gathered only the best CSS sliders that you can get your hands on right now. Combined, these CSS sliders cover all important aspects of the sliders that you see daily. Not only these improve performance, and are as much as three times faster than traditional sliders, they show us the direction that front-end is heading into, and it’s beautiful.

Best Mobile-Friendly CSS Sliders

1. Simple Carousel Pure CSS

Hence the name, Simple Carousel Pure CSS keeps things simple and appealing to the eye. If you are searching for a free carousel that will not bloat your website or blog, this tool will work out perfectly. It has back and forth arrows and bottom navigation, showing how many slides there are in total. With smooth transitions, everyone will enjoy a pleasant experience browsing through your compelling content. If you would like to perform any customization tweaks, you can, too, or just go with the default settings and call it a day. The options are right at your fingertips.

2. Responsive Slideshow

Another lovely CSS slier with a responsive structure. Nowadays, all elements and components of your website must be fully flexible and mobile-ready. Otherwise, you might get penalized by search engines, which will result in poor ranking. Thankfully, this responsive slideshow will at least take care of presenting your works of art with a fluid slider. You can even test and try the flexibility on the live preview and see how smoothly it operates first-hand. It is pretty simple and basic at first glance, but that is enough to do the job and not distract the user with the fancy stuff.

3. Annotated Linear Carousel

A stunning free annotated linear carousel that you can employ right away. It uses CSS pseudo classes, attribute values and sibling selectors to imitate the dynamic DOM state. On hover, the carousel showcases caption and the number of slides and it works only on click, going forward, by default. This tool will integrate seamlessly if you run a website with a minimalist look. Using it as is, you might put a note that it’s a slider/carousel, otherwise, some may think it just an image and not even go over it with their cursor for the content to appear.

4. Image Frame CSS Slider

If you are looking for something a little different that will spice things up on your website, this next CSS slider will do the trick. This one would fit artists ideally, even photographers, as it features an image frame with a working slideshow inside. The function to check other slides appears on hover and works only by pressing on the buttons. You can introduce your creative touch and make a personalized version of Image Frame CSS Slider. For instance, you can fully style the background color and alter other sections, so the outcome rocks your style to a tee.

5. Testimonial Slider

Whether you run an agency, a freelancing business, an online store, an app landing page, whatever, a testimonial slider always comes handy. After all, this little addition to your business helps build customer trust with honest testimonials/reviews. To include it to your website, Testimonial Slider is the tool that will get you moving in the right direction without spending a single penny. This free CSS slider for testimonials is a little breeze, offering a simplistic structure that easily adapts to different projects. Still, there is always an option to add your twist to it, for an outcome that blends with your branding naturally.

6. Gallery CSS

Ben Schwarz runs multiple conferences on front-end development around Australia, and has numerous trending open-source libraries hosted on GitHub. Gallery CSS is amongst his most sought after libraries, and truly deserves all the attention it can get. It’s a stunning slider solution that uses pure CSS, while maintaining the high standards we see JavaScript and jQuery developers use. Completely cross-browser compatible, see the preview demo homepage to see how wonderful it looks across a full-page implementation.

7. Sequence.js

Sequence prides itself as a responsive CSS framework for various animation effects: building native content sliders, creating web-based presentations, building banners, and other projects that would involve the onboarding (step by step) process. With the in-built CSS classes you can rapidly prototype an app or a widget that would involve a step by step user experience. You can achieve staggering frames per second rates completely hardware optimized, while maintaining that eloquent and modern feel. You can pick any free themes that Sequence devs provide, or purchase one of their premium ones. Custom themes are available upon request and financial investment. Documentation shows the full extent of Sequence features, and explains how to use the API so you can use Sequence in unique scenarios.

8. CSS Accordion Slider

Onur Adsay’s creative powers manifested as this accordion slider built with pure CSS and HTML. He structured his creation so that you can fully customize it on the website to meet your needs of the number of slide windows you need, the kind of height and width you require, and even color customizations. The slider will find use both for onboarding purposes, but also for general content display on large pages. It’s similar to what bloggers use on their WordPress blogs, also known as Tabbed content. Each section (class) is divided separately and can contain any kind of content within itself, even interactive media or dynamic content; which you can see an example of as the last two accordions give you the final code to use, which is custom generated as you change the settings.

9. Pure CSS Slider

If you ask Damian Drygiel why build a pure CSS slider, he will quickly tell you that it’s because its possible to do. What other reason is necessary? Damian has built multiple trending CSS and HTML pens. They have attracted the attention of thousands of developers, and CSS Slider is at the very top of those pens. This CSS code is built on the back of LESS. The slider has two ways to be navigated, custom arrows and radio buttons. Each slide can contain any information you desire, transitions are smooth and support mobile devices.

10. Pure CSS3 Slider

What about a CSS slider with an animation effect that automatically moves the sliders, much like a typical jQuery slider would? Pure CSS3 Slider from Elitewares is elegant, fast paced, and integrates with your full-page designs.

11. Unfolding the Box Model

Unfolding is yet another unique approach to using CSS transitions and transform to uncover content in sliding manner. With the help of your arrow keys, you can create a web page purely based on a sliding effect. Suitable for slideshows and interactive website concepts. Unfold can be attached to any class or content scenario, and content can be dynamically managed to reflect different states as users browse through the page. Content can also be hidden from the DOM until the particular element is reached.

12. Pure CSS Slider with Custom Effects

Nikolay Talanov wrote some spectacular pens in his career, with more than 300,000 views across his work on interactive CSS and HTML proof of concepts. Nikolay’s CSS slider with custom animation effects shows the potential of using pure CSS to create a sliding effect for your content. Each of the slides in the demo show a different transition effect. Your users will never even guess that your slider was built with nothing but CSS.

13. CSS Slider Puzzle Game

Mark Robbins has expertise in using CSS to gamify the experience. This slider puzzle game shows the different ways that CSS can be used to achieve sliding effects. While you won’t use this particular example to show content on your website, you could gain some insightful answers as to how CSS interacts with HTML to create smooth transition effects.

14. Pure CSS Horizontal Slide

David Conner has built a portfolio of CSS sliders. His horizontal slide is unique because it uses header menu items to navigate between the slides. Once a slide item is clicked, it automatically transitions to the next one, similar to how smooth page transitions work. Quite a few implementations could also be applied to make this work on your own designs.