The below benchmark of Rapier was done on Single Post page – the pages which most of your visitors will be seeing – on a fresh install of WordPress without any caching plugin.
Test was done at WebPageTest.org, with ordinary DSL speed and Chrome browser setting. The JavaScript which allows visitors to switch styles at demo site was disabled using benchmark=true variable, since its unnecessary in normal installations.
During the test, a single post example with large images, captions, paragraphs and many elements was able to fully complete loading in 1.5 seconds, at the same time loading jQuery from and two different Google Fonts from Google CDN.
Naturally the speeds you receive on your website would be modified by the number and nature of plugins you have. However, your theme must be as fast as its possible in order to save time. Especially when you use Caching plugins, your page load speeds gets closer to what your theme can provide, and the scripts and styles loaded by your plugins remain as the main speed limiting factors.
In addition to being a theme designed to work fast, Rapier includes various optimizations which let you optimize your WordPress loading speeds to the maximum.
