WP has many plugins but for any installation only 3-5 are truly necessary. Some plugins are needed if you run a specific type of site, e.g. a community for whic

WP has many plugins but for any installation only 3-5 are truly necessary. Some plugins are needed if you run a specific type of site, e.g. a community for which the Buddypress plugin is very nice. The vast majority of plugins are there as an alternative to basic php coding and you shouldn't really use them as they degrade the performance. Page response times really depend on your hosting but you can acheive spectacular performance gains by using W3 Total Cache. I've had sites where the load time for the home page have gone from 1200 ms to 5600 ms. Yes, if you want your own bespoke theme you will have to code - there's simply no way around this. The trick is to start of with a sane theme template and NOT the default wordpress theme, that one is too complex and bloated.