It is essential to let users using your website to know your company or brand history. The importance of a timeline is more when promoting your website as part of a product or service promotion.
Visitors will always check the About section to view details about the company history. If your products or services are being considered across international borders, then using a timeline is a bare necessity. A timeline is also useful when you want visitors to your website to look through archived content.
Contents
- 1 5 Best Timeline Plugin For WordPress
- 2 Types of Timeline plugins
- 3 What to look for in a timeline plugin for WordPress?
- 4 Responsively designed
- 5 Easily customizable
- 6 Fluid navigation
- 7 Top 5 trending WordPress Timeline plugins
- 8 Cool Timeline Pro
- 9 WP Timeline
- 10 Timeline Express
- 11 Everest Timeline
- 12 Timeline and History Slider
5 Best Timeline Plugin For WordPress
Timelines are an excellent and visually appealing way to essay a story of your company, product, service, or brand. Timeline plugins for WordPress enable you to build your websites with this feature. But given that there are plenty of timeline plugins out there, choosing the right one can be difficult. When checking on timeline plugins, check out the demonstrations of these plugins to see how they will be published on the website.
Most timeline plugins include templates. Applying multiple templates to timelines can make them transform into different designs, with various color schemes, in a matter of clicks. Timeline plugins also provide customizations. Options for customizations differ by the plugin. Some plugins provide more customization options, some fewer.
Timelines can also be chosen based on the type of content they display. There are timelines that only display text. Some allow you to insert infographics, images, custom HTML, or videos. So decide a timeline based on its content display offerings.
So why use a timeline plugin when WordPress already publishes content in chronological order- albeit in the reverse order? A timeline plugin simply adds more interactivity to the users. It has a more eye-catching visual appeal. Not the usual list of blog posts. Rather, blog posts that can be retrieved searched through, and content identified.
Types of Timeline plugins
There are innumerable timeline plugin types. But the following two are the most significant ones.
Dynamic content
Blog posts are retrieved automatically and displayed in the timeline. Visitors are offered a unique way to browse through historical content or archived content. Visitors can navigate forward or backward through these archives to view content published at any point in time.
Static
Displays a fixed timeline. Important dates can be marked. Static Timelines can be used on specific pages such as the About section. When users see the About section, they understand the company’s journey and their milestones until now. Static timelines need a bit of manual work to put the content together
What to look for in a timeline plugin for WordPress?
Every WordPress plugin has many features. When it comes to a WordPress timeline plugin, these are specific traits to look for:
Responsively designed
Easily customizable
Which are the top 5 Timeline plugins that are trending currently? Here’s a look at them.
Top 5 trending WordPress Timeline plugins
Cool Timeline Pro
This Timeline plugin makes it very easy to add a timeline to a WordPress powered site. Unique timelines can be created for a site. Supporting horizontal as well as vertical timelines, a WordPress site can be made to display historical or chronological information on a company, product, brand, or a person in a fluid and easy manner.
Not just company information, you can use this plugin to create a timeline listing all your blog posts in an interesting manner. Thanks to the easy settings that the plugin provides, it is easy to configure the appearance of the plugin. For example, you can change the content order, and also filter the content based on set criteria and so on.
The excellent collection of templates allows users to mix and match single-sided or double-sided timeline designs. Added to that is the availability of animation effects; timelines can be brought to life. Add these animations and see how the timeline interacts with every user interaction. You will see color schemes changing, layout adjustments being made, and many more such effects. All of this ensures a good user experience. It also assures a positive attention span from the visitor. All the more reason to vie for steady conversion rates – thanks to a simple and elegant timeline plugin.
But what happens if there is a shortage of space? Will the timeline fit in narrow spaces? There is a layout for this – specifically, the compact timeline layout. Using this timeline layout, a simple, compact timeline display can be made. Not only does it serve the purpose, but it also saves space. For those who can spare extra space on their webpages, just using the timeline is enough. At a basic, this timeline provides enough information that includes text and images. To add more, use the settings to enhance the timeline with more content.
There are two layout styles provided by this timeline:
WP Timeline
The defining aspect of this timeline plugin is that you can display any type of information on your timelines. This is the freedom that this timeline plugin gives. All types of post type formats are supported, including but not restricted to pages and posts. The wide variety of content support for timelines extends to taxonomies as well. Using taxonomical groupings, content can be classified into categories and tags. Each categorized or tagged type of content can then be conditionally associated with the display.
With the WP Timeline, you can create innumerable timelines – as much as your site requires. Each timeline can be customized with a variety of configurations and options available. When it comes to templates, WP Timeline is as good as others. Temples provided by this timeline plugin are competitive, to say the least. They can easily compete and even stand head to head with other template-intensive timeline WordPress plugins.
Templates can use single-column layouts or multiple. They can have vertically stacked or horizontally stacked layouts. They can provide text decorations that can be customized in various ways. To simply put, WP Timeline can be made to work in a myriad of ways.
Template customizations are only half the story. The output of the timeline plugin can be highly customized, as well. For a start – there are the modes – which are everyone’s favorite customization feature when using this plugin. Dark and light modes provide multiple color contrasts to display the timeline in. There are many more minute-level granular configuration options that provide customizations.
The plugin provides the ability to create intuitive user interfaces. The corresponding shortcode can be used to insert the plugin in the content of your website. When a shortcode is used, every instance of the shortcode on the website is updated whenever there is a timeline update. Being well-coded, this plugin will work seamlessly with any theme from WordPress. The responsive layouts of the WP Timeline ensure that your website looks great on any device.
Timeline Express
This timeline plugin is considered a prevalent one on the virtue of the fact that it is present on more than twenty thousand websites and still counting. A free WordPress timeline plugin, Timeline Express has lots of features, despite being free to use. For starters, there is the facility to add timeline animations – a feature much loved by visitors.
When creating timelines, there are so many options to control the display. You can display or not display dates. You can add a link to each timeline entry, that when clicked, navigates the user to more information sources. You can add your images to the timeline entries.
If you still feel that the features are not enough, then the paid version includes a comprehensive set of features. Not only do you get a whole gamut of features, but you can also premium support as well. So that if faced with technical issues, you can seek assistance. The good thing about the paid version is that you can add videos to timeline entries.
This is a better option than adding static images if you want to improve the interactivity of the content. Given the range of features and the fact that Timeline Express is free, it is a clear indication that this is one WordPress timeline plugin to try. The free version includes so many features that the paid version may not be necessary. The paid version offers advanced features that are mainly focused on improving the interactivity of the content.
Everest Timeline
The distinguishing aspect of this timeline is that it has more than 50 templates. Each template provides a wide variety of design options to work with. Having already received 5-star ratings from users of this WordPress timeline plugin, Everest Timeline has templates that closely mimic Facebook or Twitter style timeline designs.
By making layouts mimic popular social media sites, it is possible to create a degree of familiarity with the website with the visitors. The color schemes will look familiar, and users will be able to relate to the website – albeit unknowingly. This is because social media sites have more number of users, and the credibility of their designs are established.
A wide collection of media formats can be added as well. You can add sliders, HTML content, images, and videos to the timeline. Video sharing and streaming site support is available. You can add YouTube and Vimeo content apart from several other video content sources. There is the facility to add social sharing buttons. So that content can be shared and liked, increasing your website’s social media presence.
The Lightbox integration support of this WordPress timeline plugin allows you to create popup videos and images. Everest Timeline also includes about 13 animations. There are plenty of animated loader icons as well. Another interesting fact is that this timeline plugin has plenty of date formats to choose from as well. The list of options that this timeline plugin provides is enormous. Being a highly configurable timeline plugin, Everest Timeline should not just be remembered for its templates, but for several other features such as animation and media-format support too.
Timeline and History Slider
This plugin provides features such as touch-enabled navigation, shortcode options, slider designs, and template codes. Being a responsively designed plugin, Timeline and History slider is rich in features.
Just as you create a WordPress post with the title, images, and content, you can add history timeline information on your site with ease using this timeline plugin. Being a timeline plugin that is navigated using the arrow keys is an added advantage. Supporting horizontal as well vertical layouts, this timeline plugin’s distinguishing aspect is its ease of use.
If using a timeline plugin easily without much reading-around or watching videos is of prime concern, then this timeline plugin takes the prize. Apart from that, the timeline plugin’s standard set of features compete with that of other timelines, and it is hard not to choose this timeline plugin.
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