"Too many plugins" is the go-to explanation for a slow WordPress site, and sometimes it's right. But we've audited sites with 40+ plugins that loaded fine, and sites with five plugins that crawled. The plugin count is rarely the actual cause.
What's usually actually happening
- Unoptimized images, often the single biggest contributor to slow load times
- A theme running database queries on every page load instead of caching them
- No page caching or object caching configured at all
- A shared hosting plan that's simply undersized for the traffic
Where to start the audit
Run a Lighthouse report first. It'll usually point directly at images or render-blocking resources. From there, check whether a caching plugin is actually active and configured, not just installed.
If the issues persist after images and caching are fixed, the theme's own code is the next place to look, and sometimes a rebuild is genuinely the faster path than continuing to patch an aging theme.