Layer Slider Delays – initial load

Hi there,

This is something I just can’t seem to fix, no matter how much I fiddle. On this page http://goo.gl/V8XmFP there is a layer slider at the top.

Normally the slider has 2 slides with the same background image for both. In the general setting of the slider I have no background image.
The background image is of people sitting at a desk.

The problem many of our visitors have is that it takes ages for the initial slide to trigger and they end up with a large white space at the top of the page for a while. It’s not to do with network bandwidth (although that makes it worse). Tracing things, the background slide image on initial load sometimes takes 2-3 seconds to even *think* about loading. I have the image in cache, so download times are not causing this. It’s like the 1st slider takes a while to start to show.

I thought that I could fix this by adding a background image to the general settings so it can display before the 1st slide starts to display. Although this helps, the general background won’t stretch to fit, so the overall layout gets screwed.

Right now I have the general background image and the same image on the slider too, but this causes a funny effect, depending on the width of the browser due to the slide stretching to fix vs the general background not.

Is there a way to fix this? I tried some CSS to force the background to stretch I picked up from another support ticket, but it didn’t work:

.ls-inner {
background-image: url(—image url here—);
background-size: contain;
background-repeat: no-repeat !important;
background-position: center center !important;
}