Thanks, and I can understand the desire to keep things “lean and mean”. I’m one of those people that regularly opens up the Task Manager in windows and kills tasks I don’t think need to be running… (I started programming on a TRS-80 with 4k of RAM).
What I have found is that on a modern web server the “number” of plugins running doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the “quality” of those plugins. A well written plugin should not impact your site’s performance very much.
For my day job, I run a news site for a local radio station. I have close to a hundred plugins installed, plus one plugin I’ve written with several hundred thousand lines of code. But page load speeds are not impacted much because I am VERY particular about the plugins I install. In many cases I modify the plugins to fix performance issues. And the site is running on a dedicated server optimized for WordPress and the web.
Unlike one of my personal sites running on general $6/month hosting with hundreds of other sites and can barely handle a dozen plugins before page load speeds are impacted.
