Today a page’s loading speed is an important SEO indicator in addition to being important for user experience.
In accordance, Rapier is designed on methods to make it a very fast theme to keep your site fast while maintaining all the features you would expect from a top-notch WordPress Theme.
Rapier consumes minimum resources
By refraining from doing unnecessary function calls and evading keeping bulky variables in memory, Rapier saves considerable processing time and memory compared to other WordPress themes.
It is coded to do things only when strictly necessary. If you don’t turn a feature on, it just doesn’t get processed.
In addition, its HTML and CSS is coded with the same logic – things which are not specifically set to active do not get processed and displayed.
This results in not only a cleaner HTML+CSS code, but a faster loading code as well.
No Bulky Frameworks
Many prominent customizable WordPress Themes come built on bulky frameworks. These frameworks not only slow down your site to noticeable extent, but also may require that you buy them as well.
Rapier doesn’t need any such framework, and everything it does is done through plain PHP, WordPress functions, HTML and CSS. Which makes it a very fast WordPress Theme.
This also liberates you from having to deal with updates to a 3rd party framework.
Allows you to turn off unnecessary WordPress Features
You can turn off various WordPress features that are not needed at large.
For example you can turn off the new Emoji system, which was put into latest WordPress.
This Emoji code forces a rather large JavaScript download in order to provide advanced Emoji support – which is not used by most websites.
The main need for this code is providing support for displaying of complicated languages – like Asian languages. However, if your site is not in such a language, you have little need of this feature which was forced into WordPress core without any ability to turn it off.
Rapier allows you to turn it off and shave off ~1 to 1.5 seconds from loading speed of your pages.
You can also turn off jQuery in case your website is not using any jQuery specific functionality. While this will remove touch support for dropdown menus in Rapier, the website will be seamlessly functioning in most devices and still usable in older devices.
Rapier also allows you to force jQuery to be downloaded from Google’s CDN instead of from your own WordPress installation. This brings considerable advantage to page loading times since your visitors will be downloading jQuery library from a nearby location.
Works without any required JavaScript or jQuery
Rapier is responsive without having to rely on any special JavaScript or jQuery code or library. It doesn’t even require jQuery to work and be responsive.
All main responsive features work through ordinary HTML and CSS.
Works Well with CDNs
Rapier keeps dynamically created components to a minimum and keeps almost all of its functionality on HTML and CSS files.
This gives an advantage in speed when you are using a CDN, since stylesheets will be cached by your CDN and served to your users from a nearby location, increasing your site speed greatly.
Works Well with Caching Plugins
No kind of special code or function in Rapier interferes with any kind of Caching Plugin functionality.
This allows you to use your existing caching plugins without having to change anything at all!