In reply to Daniel Walmsley.

You make some sweeping assumptions Daniel that are clearly not accurate.

99.9% of site authors lack the skills to figure out what’s going on

Even if this number were true, do you honestly believe that every site owner (let's just cut out the sites that aren't ever designed to make money - let's stay with real businesses for this) is trying to run their site themselves?

Thankfully they're not. We have 1000s of clients that pay us to do that for them. I assure you not one of them has any interest in doing it themselves. I always promise that I won't try to do what they do if they will stay the hell away from anything technical to do with their site. We rarely even allow them to have admin access.

You can have a perfectly performing site and add one plugin that slows it to a crawl

Performance is not all about core. If you're thinking about deploying a site without a boatload of RAM, Nginx, Memcached, PHP FPM, Redis & Varnish (as well as a kick-ass caching plugin) then you're not very serious about your business.

Every site we create for a client (as well as our own) is blazing fast and they are far from minimalist. Yes our clients pay a chunk of change for hosting but they are all serious about their businesses so it's no big deal for them.

Furthermore, even for expert site admins, forking or patching plugins in order to tweak performance leaves you with a high maintenance burden and exposure to esoteric bugs.

None of that is necessary if you you the proper plugins. My company became a LOT better when we realized that the vast majority of free plugins are garbage. We use paid plugins almost exclusively now by reputable companies.

I can assure you that we will NEVER even once think about caring how "green" our hosting or our services are. Never.