The examples I saw came mostly from agencies shoving as many WordPress plugins as possible and then tweaking them instead of doing some (or any) basic PHP/HTML/

The examples I saw came mostly from agencies shoving as many WordPress plugins as possible and then tweaking them instead of doing some (or any) basic PHP/HTML/JS. This wasn't even about WP coding practices, since there wasn't much coding done by the agency at all. This is usually a sign that they have more "webmasters" than "web-developers". Plugins/Themes are not fundamentally a bad thing, but sometimes it feels like they're fitting a circle into a square. The worst offender I saw was a WP landing page doing 100+ SQL queries to display a basic home-page. What were these queries doing? Getting the color of the header. Then the color of the logo. And then the size of the carrousel, etc.. etc... I'm not sure what a non-technical person can do to keep things sane. However, the minimum is to have a short feedback cycle where you try the website and see if it feels sluggish. Open the browser console and see how many Megabits its downloading. Run it through LightHouse [0] and see how it scores. [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/