I think another way of looking at the question is asking “How much is too much code for a website?” It all depends on what the code is doing. You can have (theoretically speaking) an infinite amount of php, but as long as page is cached, the php doesn’t run when the user goes to the site, so it really doesn’t matter, to your users anyway.

Good post, I do see this question come up quite a bit, so kudos on addressing it well. Another thing I’d highly recommend (although you already know this, and anyone who could use the advice won’t read this, so for the sake of getting it off my chest… ) when in doubt, stick to the plugins that have a large community, are updated regularly, and have been around a while. It makes life exponentially easier as others help resolve plugin conflicts/compatibility, updates are always available, tutorials, forums, and support abound, the community maintains accountability for security and performance, and life is just plain easier.

I wish someone had told me that when I first started.

Cheers!

I did several speed tests on your site and my guesses proved to be right.

The slider/carousel is unnecessary and eats up a ton of your loading time. These are considered old fashioned today and anything that moves on your site without the ability to start it and stop it violates web standards for accessibility, and US law for ADA and Web Accessibility. You have the Plugin running the slideshow, the images, scripts, and jQuery which all add up.

The social media Plugin on the side is also unnecessary and slowing things down. There are two issues with this. First, if people wish to share, they already have the tools needed to share. Second, you need people to share your articles, so put these on the posts not floating over on the side. Incorporate them.

The ads are slowing down the site. They are pulling the ads in from off of your site, which still counts as bandwidth and taxing the site with the graphics and loading.

The phone chat thing also eats up bandwidth.

The front page is way overloaded with too many images, scripts, ads, etc. All total up. Pinterest totals up to a huge number alone. It all adds up.

Think about all the ways you could clean these things up and introduce them in more useful ways, and you will see the site get faster.

And thanks for caring enough to make your site more efficient. The joy of a good website is not just speed but navigation and organization, putting the focus on the user’s experience making it easy for them to use your site.

Good luck with it! And thanks for the giggle. I’ve done that so many times, especially after I was sure that all was perfect.

Today I ran the W3 Markup Validation and found almost 170 errors! Freak out! First, I blamed the theme, then I blamed the plugins, but when I deactivated them, there were hardly any errors eliminated. Then I ran a clean version of my theme and there were only a few errors there.

Well, who else to blame??? Me???? Well, that is who it was! All over the place, I had slopped around all kinds of ill-formed expressions. I’ve already eliminated more than half, and expect to correct the rest tomorrow.

I am a complete Yoast SEO fanatic too. One very helpful plugin manages plugins by allowing you to categorize them and activate/deactivate by category. I can instantly deactivate all of my “core” plugins to see if they are causing problems, then reactivate them instantly (painlessly.) The name of the plugin is “Plugin Organizer” by Jeff Sterup. It has saved me hours and works perfectly.

I have found by sticking to a small handful of “essential” plugins, you can concentrate more on what really matters at the end of the day, the actual content of the site.