Why do you need a WordPress gallery plugin? The simple answer is to help you make an impact with your images. You can make an even bigger impression on your audience by adding in a lightbox popup function. Of course, there’s much more to it. A WordPress gallery with a lightbox popup can also make it easier for your users to view and appreciate your images or videos.
Plus, it’s really easy to set up! But before we talk about how to do this, let’s have a quick look at why you should be using a WordPress gallery plugin, and why it’s a good idea to use a lightbox with this.
Why You Should Use WordPress Gallery Plugin
A WordPress gallery plugin is more efficient than the gallery that comes standard with WordPress. We’ve covered this before in more detail, but just to recap quickly, a plugin like FooGallery Free (or Pro) gives you far more flexibility when it comes to customizing your gallery and adding the features you need.
With a gallery plugin, you can create unique and beautiful photo galleries, which can be used to showcase your products or services, as part of your content marketing strategy, or simply to add visual aids to your blog. The possibilities are many and varied.
There are other benefits as well. As most gallery plugins use thumbnails, instead of loading the full-size image, you’re cutting down on page load times. Of course, your full-size images will load when someone clicks on the thumbnails, so they should still be optimized. FooGallery also uses Lazy Loading to further improve page speed.
You don’t have to start with a paid plugin either – FooGallery Free, for example, gives you plenty of customization options. You can use different gallery templates, customize your hover effects and add captions and descriptions. The advantage of using a premium WordPress gallery, like FooGallery Pro, is that you get a lot more features and options. You can add video, for example, which is useful for boosting traffic and social shares, or you can add advanced paging, hover presets, and so on.
Adding Lightbox Popup
Adding a gallery to your page is a great way to get someone’s attention. But most galleries work by displaying thumbnail images. What if someone wants to see the full-size image? More particularly, what if they want to see the full-size image without having to navigate away from your page? This is why you need a WordPress lightbox plugin.
A lightbox is a box or frame that pops up on top of the page you’re currently viewing. In the case of a gallery, it will open a larger or full-size version of the thumbnail image from the gallery. Users can then scroll through the images and, if the lightbox or gallery allows, even share specific images on social media. Then, when they’re done, they simply close the lightbox, returning them to the page they were on.
A lightbox is also a great way to view videos. Users can click on the video in the gallery, opening it in a bigger lightbox popup, from which they can view the video. Again, they don’t have to navigate away from your page and they can potentially share the video on social channels.
Another big advantage of using a plugin like FooBox is that it is responsive. In other words, the frame adjusts automatically to the size of the screen on which it is being viewed. If you’re looking at the images on a phone or tablet, then, the lightbox adjusts to accommodate this. This is a huge plus for ensuring your site is mobile-friendly. Having responsive lightbox popups has become increasingly important nowadays, as most of the world’s online activity has moved to the mobile sphere, and it doesn’t look like that is going to change anytime soon.
Tips for Choosing the Right Plugin
Many free lightbox plugin developers promise immense value without really delivering on that promise. After all, what are their disappointed customers going to do? They can’t demand a refund, and even if they remove it from their website, the download count will stay the same. Even negative reviews can be dealt with by positive review bombing to keep the score up. This is why it’s particularly important to use plugins from trusted, proven developers. Unfortunately, this means that in order to access most of their functions, you might have to pay a small fee, but you’ll soon find that it’s worth it, especially considering that the alternative means dealing with poorly designed, broken plugins. Besides, most of the premium options do have a free version, which may be limited, but it gets the job done to a certain extent.
Using plugins such as FooBox for implementing lightbox popups to your website is one of the best ways of doing so. It can save you a lot of precious time and effort, and, as a bonus, improve your site’s optimization, which can go a long way in securing more regular visitors. When looking for the right plugin, it is important to make sure that it’s got everything you need to set up the lightbox popups correctly. Poorly implemented lightbox functions can be worse for the user experience than not having them at all!
Creating a WordPress Gallery With Lightbox Popup
So now that you know why we’re using a WordPress gallery with a lightbox popup, let’s take a look at how this works and how you can create this on your own WordPress site.
Here’s a gallery we created using FooGallery Pro, with FooBox Pro as our lightbox. To see how it works with the lightbox popup, just click on one of the images. It will open in a frame above the page, and from here you can scroll through the other images. To close the lightbox, you can either click on the ‘X’ in the top right corner or just click on the screen behind the lightbox.