Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Unless you decide to develop your own custom-functions, you'll always need plug-ins.

Also, some plugins will slow down page load times more than others: plugins that have to access other sites to get whatever they need, such as related sites type plugins, share this etc.

If you can avoid those plugins you'll be helping your page load times.

Cheers,

Martin.

Make sure that you use a caching plugin like WP-Cache or W3 Total Cache. In this case, a page (and thus any plugin's output on that page) is cached for a few hours. This will help reduce load on your server, and will also fetch the pages faster.

-Revolves

Yes but there's a solution to make your site heaps faster

Well I am not sure I agree, Plugins are basically a PHP file, with PHP programming that should be helpful to the user, just because you have a plugin does not mean that it is slowing down your site, in fact unless your actively using a plugin, I do not see how it can do anything, now there are some plugins that perhaps are poorly written that perhaps may cause your website problems, but it is not fair to say that all plugins cause issues with a websites loading time.

A well designed plugin should "piggy back" on top of the existing database structure, MySQL is more than capable of providing a robust user experience.

Just an alternative point of view.