Top WordPress Lightbox Plugins of 2024: Our Expert Picks for Enhanced Image Display

If you’ve stumbled upon this post, you’re probably on the hunt for the best WordPress Lightbox plugin. Having a website is basically the most crucial element of owning a business in this modern times. Not only is it a good opportunity for representing your brand, but it can also help you be lucrative at a whole new level. Designing your website, for instance, brings a whole nother experience to both you and your visitors. Don’t you agree?

Maintaining an interesting website and attempting to make potential consumers stay on it is an important thing to consider. It increases your chance of gaining a bigger audience which will result in publicity and of course, consumers. All considered crucial elements in owning and maintaining businesses. 

Adding a bit more spice to your site to gain more followers is always a good move to gain attention. You may want to add pop-up images and Lightboxes.

Let’s not make you wait any longer. We might have a few things up our sleeve that will pretty much solve your predicaments.

But before we make the list, let’s go over the basics…

What Is A WordPress Lightbox?

In Layman’s terms, Lightbox is a popup feature of a website that dims the rest of the page. It’s either an image, video, opt-in form, or other promotional paraphernalia. You have most probably seen one of those Lightbox samples on multiple websites.

Lightbox serves as a good attempt in getting information such as email addresses for potential customers, and to highlight an important message when someone visits your website.  

It can be based on Javascript, jQuery, or CSS3 scripts that are responsible for beautifying your website and give it your brand’s personal touch. It is ideal for eCommerce websites to let them show off a gallery of their products and boost sales.

Here are examples of Lightboxes to help you out in deciding which one would you like on your page: 

Email Lightbox is an example of a lightbox that asks visitors to subscribe to your site and gain information such as email address from them. 

Cookies Lightbox is the one we have probably seen most. It’s when you inform the visitor that cookies are to be used for their best browsing experience

Promotion Lightbox lives up to its title. This helps in promoting, maybe your online store or other businesses. 

Hope this helped in understanding and deciding which Lightbox you want to opt to.  

How Does It Work?

Ever wonder how these bad boys work? 

Lightboxes work in 2 modes: the parent and child mode. The child mode is a popup element that makes the background dim; the dimmed page, on the other hand, is the parent mode. That’s all there is to it, really. But we will dive into each and every single Lightbox we have for you today, so keep an eye out. :)

How To Add Lightbox On WordPress?

Manual

There are different ways of adding a Lightbox to WordPress, the first one is to simply do it on your own, or manually as they call it.  

Manually adding a Lightbox means coding it on your site yourself. It sounds complicated and it can be depending on you. The pros of manually coding a lightbox are that you can customize it to your heart’s content. 

For you to be able to manually add a Lightbox, you should be familiar with WordPress code editor. As previously mentioned Javascript, jQuery and CSS3 are the usual scripts related to creating Lightboxes. 

When coding Lightboxes manually, you are again faced with two options. You can either start a code from scratch or just choose to easier route, coding using a preexisting plugin. 

A number of tutorials are posted to instruct you on how to code manually or just edit an existing plugin. 

Plugins 

If you don’t have much knowledge about coding or just not the type to do so, that’s okay. You’re not alone. Another option is adding a Lightbox to your website is simply adding a plugin, and it will do the trick for you. 

Additionally, if you are not interested in anything too fancy for your site, you can just use Simple Lightbox. Given its name, it is simple and customizable as well. You just need to insert the links to image attachments you want into your posts or pages. Simple Lightbox also resizes your images automatically to fit the screen. 

That’s it! Simple, helpful, and free! 

If you are using your site to basically add spice and pull more attention, or consumers, you may not want to go with just “simple”. We get that! 

There are still plugins out there that can improve in making your site stand out from the rest.

We listed five of them below to help you in making the decision, so without further ado: 

Best Lightbox Plugins To Date: 

Responsive Lightbox and Gallery

Say “bye-bye” to coding!

Created by dfactory, Responsive Lightbox & Gallery is a free plugin, but you can also purchase premium features. This is very popular among WordPress users, largely because it’s easy to use. It offers to display single post images as a gallery and allows you to use the image’s title, description, or caption. 

It has a “drag-and-drop” gallery builder where you can create your aesthetic galleries and preferred styles in just a few clicks!

It was built to be lightweight and SEO-friendly so your page doesn’t have to be turtle-slow to load. The developers surely took making this one a perfect piece very seriously.

Apart from that, it has eight responsive lightbox scripts you can choose from. This highly rated and user-friendly plugin is a good choice for being consumer-friendly as it can fit any mobile screen. 

Even without buying anything, Responsive Lightbox already offers a lot of customizable features for your site. The extensions of this plug-in cost around $14 to $50, if you ever decide to give it a go. 

Get Responsive Lightbox and Gallery

Easy FancyBox 

This is a WordPress plugin that gives you a flexible and pleasing lightbox that allows you to put media links on your website. It supports all basic image types, videos from Vimeo, Dailymotion, and youtube, as well as pdf files, even image maps, and many more.  

When it comes to styling, it offers overlay colors and opacity, border color and size as well as default sizes per media type. It supports a customized layout where users can change visuals with CSS.

It is mobile-optimized which makes it look great on all devices where you can zoom in/out and navigate smoothly.

This plugin also has the pro version that offers priority support, extra styling options, more automatic pop-up options, and slideshow effects. The paid versions have different varieties. You can purchase a one-year pro version for one site for $19 to unlimited sites for $299. 

Get Easy FancyBox

Foobox 

Foobox by Foo plugins offers responsive designs including the automatic resizing of files such as images, videos, and other visual data. It has swipe navigation for mobile users as well as Javascript and stylesheet for easy usage. 

It is mobile-friendly which most users usually prefer the websites to be for easy access/usage.

It also has embedded social sharing buttons that allow your guests to easily share your content to their preferred social platform. It also gives the option to choose whether to include JS and CSS assets. 

This plugin has a free version but also offers paid extensions that give way to a whole lot of additional settings such as a 5 theme color option, Deeplinking support, custom caption choices, and many more.

The price range is from $29 to $149 and renewals offer half the original price. It gives a free trial for seven days, so give it a try! 

Get Foobox 

Other Helpful Plugins for You: 

Don’t leave us just yet! Before we conclude everything, here are just a few more helpful sites in bumping up your site to attract more people! 

Elementor is a site/plugin that helps you make visually enticing pages for your website. An all-in-one panel where you can control your website’s nook and crannies. 

This is an effective tool for building websites and can work with any type of person. This plugin even has Global Lightbox Settings which is turned on by default. This element allows the highlight of your chosen media. 

You can turn this feature on or off and even customize your site’s lightbox. 

Just enable the lightbox option on gallery sections or image blocks. 

Another tip, if you are also looking for an option to place a pop-up without using a plug-in, that’s possible too! There are sites that offer to aid you in having pop-ups without plugins, one example is Popupsmart. Just sign in for free and generate a pop-up that will fit your liking! Sounds cool, huh?

It’s a Wrap!

To summarize all of the plugins listed above: 

• Responsive Lightbox by dfactory. This is a perfect budget-friendly plugin for your website! 
• WordPress Lightbox by Huge-IT. This plugin is perfect for photography or writing blogs for its watermark and downloading features! 
• Easy FancyBox. Flexibility is its core and is perfect for incorporating its wide support media links. 
• Foobox by Foo Plugins. Offering responsive designs and social sharing buttons can be perfect for a more close-knit consumer experience. 
• WP featherlight. This totally free plugin provides a simple, configuration-free, and elegant design for those who do not like to tinker too much on their sites. 
• Nivo Slider. Yet another TOTALLY free stylish plugin that lets users have the best experience by giving them the freedom to have custom slider themes and which actually works on all WP themes.

Lightbox is a good marketing strategy when you make business websites. It enables you to highlight or emphasize any images, products, and even information that you want. At the end of the day, it will still be up to you which is the perfect lightbox plugin to use. 

Being in this article means that you are trying hard to research which suits your need and that’s a plus. Remember to also consider your target audience/consumers whenever creating a lightbox plugin.

Here’s where we part. Hope this article helped you!