Interested in building a carousel but don’t know where to start? You’re in the perfect place; today we’ll explore the best CSS and JavaScript carousel tutorials that are available on Envato Tuts+.
What is a Carousel on a Website Used For?
Carousels are often found on the front pages of websites, where they serve a variety of purposes, ranging from aesthetic enhancement to functional content delivery.
Here are a few ways you might find them in use:
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For Highlighting Key Content: Carousels are excellent for drawing attention to specific items or features. For instance, an eCommerce site might use a carousel to spotlight best-selling products, special deals, or new arrivals.
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For Optimizing Space: They provide a solution to the challenge of limited space. By rotating content, carousels allow you to present more information in a compact area, preventing the need for users to scroll excessively.
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For Enhancing User Engagement: The dynamic nature of carousels can make a website more interactive and visually appealing. This interactivity can increase user engagement, encouraging visitors to spend more time on the site.
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For Storytelling and Sequential Content: Carousels can also be used to tell a story or present sequential information, like a step-by-step guide or a series of related articles, in an organized and visually appealing way.
Now let’s get to our roundup of some favorite CSS JS carousel tutorials available on Envato Tuts+.
10 CSS and JavaScript Carousel Tutorials
From tutorials explaining how to use the Bootstrap carousel component, to various JavaScript carousel and slideshow libraries, to instructions on how to code things yourself from scratch, we have it all on Tuts+! Let’s explore some top-performing and easy-to-follow tutorials for creating a carousel in CSS:
1. Pure CSS Slideshow
Did you know that you can build a CSS-only slideshow?
The demo below shows how to achieve it by taking advantage of the CSS checkbox hack technique. It’s fully functional and supports arrow navigation, dot navigation, thumbnail navigation, and keyboard navigation.
2. Vanilla JavaScript Carousel (14 Lines of Code!)
In this exercise, instructor Jemima Abu, goes through a really quick way to build a simple scrollable JavaScript carousel with just a few lines of code.
3. Vanilla JavaScript Full-Screen Slideshow
This exercise describes how to create a full-screen JavaScript slideshow where the default cursor turns into a navigation arrow each time we hover over the slideshow.
Depending on the cursor position, the next or previous arrow displays. Upon clicking on it, the next or previous slide comes into view.
This JavaScript carousel supports a few customization options for the autoplay mode as well.
4. Responsive Slider With Owl.js
This tutorial teaches you how to use Owl.js (a very popular JavaScript library) to build a full-screen slider.
Going a bit further, it also shows how to animate the text elements of each active slide sequentially by using a few of the carousel events.
As a bonus, this slider carousel tutorial also covers how to adapt the dots position based on the height of the contents of the active slide.
This library isn’t maintained anymore, so use it with caution.
5. Responsive Image Gallery With slick.js
In this exercise, we’re using slick.js, another popular JavaScript carousel, to develop an image gallery.
On the desktop mode, on the left side, there are the thumbnail images, while on the right side is the featured/active slide. On the mobile mode, the thumbnail images appear either below the featured one or don’t appear at all.
To create this effect, we’re setting two independent carousels and synchronizing them, thanks to slick’s synchronization feature.
6. Responsive Slider With Swiper.js
Swiper.js is another well-known choice for building complex JavaScript carousels. In this exercise, we’re incorporating a swiper.js slider as a part of an asymmetric layout.
7. How to Build a Responsive Image Slider With Swiper.js (Video Tutorial)
More Swiper.js for you, because it’s that good. Watch Adi Purdila as he demonstrates how to build a couple of different Swiper carousels in this video tutorial. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Tuts+ YouTube channel for plenty more like this!
8. Responsive Bootstrap Lightbox Gallery
You might be familiar with Bootstrap, the most popular front-end development framework. In this exercise, we extend its functionality by building a lightbox gallery.
In fact, we aren’t building anything new. We’re just customizing and combining existing Bootstrap components.
This tutorial is a solid HTML CSS carousel option.
9. Responsive UIkit Lightbox Gallery
UIkit is another modular front-end framework, and we’ve published various tutorials lately about its features! In this tutorial, we extend its lightbox component by adding dot navigation.
10. Draggable Image Gallery and a Custom Lightbox With GSAP
GSAP is a popular JavaScript animation library. Thanks to its Draggable plugin, we’re able to implement a draggable image gallery that supports a responsive lightbox gallery. So, if you’re after an animated carousel, this tutorial might suit your needs.
CodeCanyon and Envato Elements WordPress Carousels
Things don’t stop here! If you need a carousel for your WordPress site, CodeCanyon and Envato Elements provide hundreds of them to choose from.
21 Best WordPress Slider & Carousel Plugins of 2024
Whether you want to show off customer testimonials, your latest blog posts, your best images, or other media on your website, there is a WordPress slider plugin or WordPress carousel slider plugin out there that’s right for you.
16 Best WordPress Gallery Plugins for 2024
In this post, we review the best premium WordPress gallery plugins available on CodeCanyon, as well as listing five of the best free plugins. The list is broken down by gallery type: there are plugins for video and multimedia, images, and WordPress grids.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this list of CSS carousel slider tutorials has given you enough inspiration to build your own carousels. Enjoy the demos, read the associated tutorials, and last but not least, be sure to follow Envato Tuts+ on CodePen for more creative pens!
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