Slideshows are a great way to highlight different products in your store. Some themes have slideshows built-in, but then you're very limited in terms of how you would like to configure them. You might only be able to place a slideshow on the home page or you might only be able to include so many slides. Built-in slideshow themes are pretty limiting and it's not considered a good practice to look for this sort of functionality in a theme. Instead, if you can find a slideshow in a plugin, those are usually a bit more flexible in terms of placement and exactly how you want the slides to work. We'll be using the WooSlider and WooSlider – WooCommerce Products Slideshow plugins together to create a slideshow of products that link to the specific product pages.

How to do it…

The beauty of using a plugin is that we can place this slideshow on any page we want. In the following steps, I'll be placing this slideshow on the sample page that's created when you install WordPress. You can choose to put it on any page, including the home page.

1. In the WordPress admin, click on Pages.
2. Find the page where you wish to place the slideshow.
3. Click on the title of that page to edit it.
4. Click on Add Media. A modal window will pop up.
5. Click on Slideshows.
   
6. Select Products as the Slideshow Type.
7. Select how many slides you want through the Number of Products setting.
8. You can optionally add an Add to Cart button right on the slide with the Display "Add to Cart" button setting.

   Note

   I don't think you need to clutter up the slideshow with a button. Users will likely want to know more about the product before they purchase anything, so they'll probably click on the product title to get more information and there's already an Add to Cart button on that page.

9. You can now select what products appear in the slideshow by choosing a category, a tag, featured products only, or sale products only. You can select any mix of these that you like with the Categories, Tags, Featured products only, and On sale products only settings.
10. I recommend letting users click through to the product pages by enabling the Link the Slide Title to the product setting.
11. Click on Insert Slideshow and you'll see a shortcode has been created and inserted into the content of the page.
12. Click on Update to save the page.

If you view the page on the frontend, you'll see your slideshow as shown in the following screenshot: