If that’s the case, how can some sites run 200+ plugins and still any have decent load times?
The answer to that is it depends. A properly configured site might do well even if there are over 200+ plugins in use (which, in my humble opinion, is a bit ridiculous but each to its own).
- How many of those 200+ plugins use server resources (database, server side processing, etc.) heavily?
- Is the site using some sort of caching to help keep performance on an optimal level?
- Is the site hosted on a good server? Shared hosting is cheap and is good enough for most sites, but it might not be enough if your website gets a lot of visitors per day.
- How many visits does your site gets per day? The more the higher the impact is on the server and the more time it’ll take for operations to complete – such as updating the views count of your site, something WPP does every time someone visits your posts and pages.
- Is the InnoDB storage engine enabled on your server? Some hosts disable it (specially shared hosting services) to save resources since this engine uses more physical space on the hard drive. WPP needs it for quick write operations without locking the entire database table – but if it’s not available, the database server will assign it whichever is the default one (often MyISAM, which is slower and generally not recommended for high write operations).
- Etc.
There are a lot of variables which can have an impact on your site’s speed. As I said, having a lot of plugins is just one of them. I should have elaborated a bit more on my previous reply.
Hope that clarifies things a bit.
