Download websites that use FlexSlider

About FlexSlider

Finding FlexSlider on a page says more about when the front end was built than about what the site sells. FlexSlider belongs to the Widgets generation that arrived around 2011, when responsive layouts were new and nearly every commercial theme needed a way to rotate a few wide photographs across the top of a homepage. The slider is written in JavaScript and depends on jQuery, and the job it does has since been absorbed by plain CSS and by newer libraries that carry no jQuery requirement at all.

Longevity, not adoption, is the reason the code is still out there. Automattic Inc. released the project under GPL v2, which let theme authors bundle the files straight into a paid or free WordPress theme instead of asking the site owner to install anything. A slider that ships inside a theme keeps running for as long as the theme does, and themes routinely outlive the agencies that installed them. As of September 2026 we detect FlexSlider on 177,856 sites, and a large share of those installations were never a deliberate choice by the person who owns the domain.

For a researcher the practical value here is negative evidence. A site still serving a jQuery slider from the early responsive period is a site whose theme has not been rebuilt in years, which tends to travel with an unmaintained plugin stack, an aging PHP runtime and a layout that predates mobile-first conventions. Agencies selling redesigns build prospect lists on exactly that signal. Security researchers use the inverse of it, because a library bundled into a theme stays frozen at whatever release the theme author copied in, and nobody ships it an update.

Geographically the picture is unremarkable in a useful way. United States contributes 59,051 of the detections and .com recurs throughout the remainder, which is roughly what any WordPress theme artifact looks like when it is mapped onto domains. A per-domain lookup can confirm that one competitor still runs the slider. The downloadable list answers a different question, which is how much of a market segment is still on that generation of front-end tooling, where those sites cluster, and what else they run alongside it.

Detection is a fingerprint match against the script and the markup classes it expects, so it is worth being plain about the edges. A theme that renames the file or concatenates the slider into one bundled asset can hide it from us, which makes our count a floor rather than a census. Installations that appear only on an interior page we did not fetch are missed as well. The number moves in one direction over time, downward, as themes are finally replaced, and the rate of that decline is itself the interesting series for anyone tracking how the jQuery ecosystem is decaying.