To bring your first Swiper slider to life, you begin by building the HTML structure. The main container uses the swiper class, and the slides are placed inside a swiper-wrapper element. Each slide is represented by a swiper-slide element. This structure tells Swiper which elements make up the slider and its slides.

Once your HTML is set up, you need to connect the Swiper JavaScript library. You do this by adding a <script> tag that loads Swiper from a CDN, followed by your own script.js file. In your JavaScript file, you initialize Swiper by creating a new instance and passing the selector for your slider container. This step activates the slider and makes it interactive. Without this initialization step, the slider will not function—the slides will simply be stacked on the page without any sliding behavior. The default Swiper settings will enable basic sliding right away, and you can customize the behavior later as you learn more.