I think that is somewhat the point of the OP. If you're average joe and just want to click a few buttons WTC + cloudflare is popular. If on the other hand you d

I think that is somewhat the point of the OP. If you're average joe and just want to click a few buttons WTC + cloudflare is popular. If on the other hand you don't like bloated problem inducing options, you do it yourself. For example; Throw in Paul Irish's .htaccess boilerplate: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/.htaccess https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/.htacc... Enable APC http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apc/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apc/ Minify using a build script Use one of the Many CDN plugins for images. If you're worried about load balancing and DDOS there are plenty of solutions out there that are handled at the host level.