Recommended Slider for Themes

[mariana_pic]

Hello team

Maybe someone from Hubspot can answer this question to me. I have site where I’m using sliders - slick & glide, i want to remove slick because of jquery and want to remove glide because is not being maintained.

I see that hubspot added a module with a slider and are using splide, but I also see that the latest update in splide is from 2022.

I would like to move to a slider that is mantained, but I don’t want users to be adding modules and having multiple sliders on my pages.

Is hubspot recommending splide?

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @mariana_pic, 

I've used swiper.js for many years before moving over to splide a while ago. I've moved because of performance issues and since the latest swiper.js version I've used(at least tried) was quite buggy and lead to many errors.

Using the newest version is something that almost every developer should advise you against. The idea of "oh look - a shine new thing, I want it" is not the way you should make decisions that might be used for quite some time. 

Splide is a great slider script with a lot of options and possibilities. So I wouldn't suggest not to use it only because it's last update was 1,5- 2 years ago (and no I'm not a splide fan-boy by any means). But it fully depends on what you're trying to achieve.

From a developers perspective the key is how splide (or any gallery script) would be implemented in modules/your theme to have the best possible performance.

@Sasha-A8 It's quite outdated and almost replaced by the newest web-technologies and if implemted not correctly it might have an negative impact on page-speed?!

best, 

Anton

[NBrown67 · Accepted solution]

@mariana_pic wrote:

Hello team

Maybe someone from Hubspot can answer this question to me. I have site where I’m using sliders - slick & glide, i want to remove slick because of jquery and want to remove glide because is not being maintained.

I see that hubspot added a module with a slider and are using splide, but I also see that the latest update in splide is from 2022.

I would like to move to a slider that is mantained, but I don’t want users to be adding modules and having multiple sliders on my pages.

Is hubspot recommending splide?

---

It really depends what you're looking for. There are many slider libraries out there.

Swiper.js, Splide, TinySlider, Blaze.js, and a dozen more.

Swiper is good if you want bells and whistles and some tricks for mobile / touch but can be a bit bloated.

All of these libraries have maintenance problems and bugs - that's just how open source works. 

Blaze is arguably the most lightweight if all you want is a simple carousel (left / right autoplay, buttons, ...) which I would say is 99.99999% of most marketing websites. It's relatively easy to configure for minimizing CLS shift via CSS defintions etc which is nice. It does have some issues with performance when the page gets resized by not appropriately unbinding previous event listeners amongst other things. But, for a marketing website that's relatively neglibile.

Most websites aren't doing 3D spins, WebGL transitions, etc that heavier lbiraries are good for - and all of these are bad UI and a11y problems anyways.

Blaze also isn't the most maintained and has a few bugs as well.

I've personally never like Splide. I don't think CSS-based carousels are there yet + a11y issues.

Slick and OwlCarousel should have stopped being used years ago imo. These were never great to start with and HubSpot included Slick as part of it's modules for a long time and to this end I wouldn't take random package usage in any website or platform as an indication of a "best practice".

These are decisions tht should be made by your developer relevant to the particular context and goals. Frankly, none of this may be relevant. Personally, I use my own rolled derivative of Blaze.js for marketing websites that patches it's issues and is slightly more performant / with better a11y.

But, again, these are dev based decisions. Randomly throwing in libraries as a "best practice" is the anti-thesis of appropriate development and performance goals and coalescing advice from forums like these to make these decisions, wherein most people giving advice aren't particularly experienced, also isn't the best of decisions and can result in receiving advice that is often misguided.

[NBrown67 · Accepted solution]

@mariana_pic wrote:

Hello team

Maybe someone from Hubspot can answer this question to me. I have site where I’m using sliders - slick & glide, i want to remove slick because of jquery and want to remove glide because is not being maintained.

I see that hubspot added a module with a slider and are using splide, but I also see that the latest update in splide is from 2022.

I would like to move to a slider that is mantained, but I don’t want users to be adding modules and having multiple sliders on my pages.

Is hubspot recommending splide?

---

It really depends what you're looking for. There are many slider libraries out there.

Swiper.js, Splide, TinySlider, Blaze.js, and a dozen more.

Swiper is good if you want bells and whistles and some tricks for mobile / touch but can be a bit bloated.

All of these libraries have maintenance problems and bugs - that's just how open source works. 

Blaze is arguably the most lightweight if all you want is a simple carousel (left / right autoplay, buttons, ...) which I would say is 99.99999% of most marketing websites. It's relatively easy to configure for minimizing CLS shift via CSS defintions etc which is nice. It does have some issues with performance when the page gets resized by not appropriately unbinding previous event listeners amongst other things. But, for a marketing website that's relatively neglibile.

Most websites aren't doing 3D spins, WebGL transitions, etc that heavier lbiraries are good for - and all of these are bad UI and a11y problems anyways.

Blaze also isn't the most maintained and has a few bugs as well.

I've personally never like Splide. I don't think CSS-based carousels are there yet + a11y issues.

Slick and OwlCarousel should have stopped being used years ago imo. These were never great to start with and HubSpot included Slick as part of it's modules for a long time and to this end I wouldn't take random package usage in any website or platform as an indication of a "best practice".

These are decisions tht should be made by your developer relevant to the particular context and goals. Frankly, none of this may be relevant. Personally, I use my own rolled derivative of Blaze.js for marketing websites that patches it's issues and is slightly more performant / with better a11y.

But, again, these are dev based decisions. Randomly throwing in libraries as a "best practice" is the anti-thesis of appropriate development and performance goals and coalescing advice from forums like these to make these decisions, wherein most people giving advice aren't particularly experienced, also isn't the best of decisions and can result in receiving advice that is often misguided.

[Sasha-A8]

What's wrong with using jquery?

[NBrown67]

---

@Sasha-A8 wrote:

What's wrong with using jquery?

---

Everything? Always been a bad idea and especially in 2024. jQuery was relevant a decade ago

Why, for something as  trivial as a marketing website on a platform like HubSpot, would you degrade a website w/  a bloated JS wrapper? The only thing jQuery does is enforce lazy dev for people that can't be bothered to learn how to actually code and use ES6, so they include a bloated external JS library that's wildly unnecessary. There is nothing on a marketing website short terse clean Vanilla JS cannot accomplish. And, any package still using jQuery should be phased out as well.

This , by it's definition, is a degradation to web performance 

[mariana_pic]

And what would you do about the slider?

Just no slider?
We were using glide and now google is marking it as legacy...

What do you think about swiper.js or splide.js?

[NBrown67]

This was already responsed to: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CMS-Development/Recommended-Slider-for-Themes/m-p/981431/highlight/...

[Anton · Accepted solution]

Hi @mariana_pic, 

I've used swiper.js for many years before moving over to splide a while ago. I've moved because of performance issues and since the latest swiper.js version I've used(at least tried) was quite buggy and lead to many errors.

Using the newest version is something that almost every developer should advise you against. The idea of "oh look - a shine new thing, I want it" is not the way you should make decisions that might be used for quite some time. 

Splide is a great slider script with a lot of options and possibilities. So I wouldn't suggest not to use it only because it's last update was 1,5- 2 years ago (and no I'm not a splide fan-boy by any means). But it fully depends on what you're trying to achieve.

From a developers perspective the key is how splide (or any gallery script) would be implemented in modules/your theme to have the best possible performance.

@Sasha-A8 It's quite outdated and almost replaced by the newest web-technologies and if implemted not correctly it might have an negative impact on page-speed?!

best, 

Anton

[Sasha-A8]

@Anton jquery just got updated recently. It's still being actively maintained. And it's still one of the most used frameworks on the web today. Other than that, even HubSpot seems to recommend jquery by giving you an option to automatically include it in your website settings. I think anything not implemented correctly will impact page speed. 

[alyssamwilie · Accepted solution]

HubSpot doesn't recommend jQuery; they stopped supporting the option years ago which is why it still only gives the options for versions 1.7 and 1.11.X while JQuery is already at version 3.7.1. They only left the option for backwards compatibility. Even in the documentation where they show how to add the latest versions of jQuery to older websites they state "going jQuery free is generally better for performance and security".