Site-speed Memes

Someone suggests optimizing your site and you're just sitting there nodding along like "yeah, yeah, optimization, totally." Then they hit you with "add another plugin" and suddenly you're Joey from Friends with the biggest smile on your face. Because why spend hours refactoring code and actually learning performance best practices when you can just slap on another 500KB WordPress plugin that promises to make everything faster? Sure, your site now loads 47 different JavaScript files and has more dependencies than a soap opera, but at least you didn't have to touch any actual code. The plugin says it optimizes things, so it must be working, right? Right?