Nivo Slider have just celebrated over 2 million downloads and it’s hardly surprising. It’s ease of use and intuitive functionality allows webmasters to easily put an image slider on to their website. We use it quite a bit, to create powerful presentations of strong images on our websites and it adds tremendous value to our work. However, recently we have diagnosed significant issues with sites using Nivo Slider, including their own website.
The issue occurs when the slider is running. Each new slide essentially “reloads” the next image again from scratch, even if it has been loaded in before. This can cause significant bandwidth issues and increases both memory and CPU utilisation in some browsers. Some users have even reported that leaving the slider open for a while can cause the browser to perform slowly or crash.
We have raised this issue with the developers of Nivo Slider, but there is no indication of a timeline for when this will be fixed, so we have taken it upon ourselves to recode portions of Nivoslider to resolve this issue. We have also optimised a few extra bits of code in there for better performance. We would like to share this with other developers out there who are experiencing the same issue (The download link is below). Since updating our websites with the new Nivo Slider, we have noticed significant drops in bandwidth and increased performance.
We have included the whole package here (v3.2), however, the only modified files are the CSS file (one minor change to .nivo-main-image) and the Javascript files.
