The only way to make wordpress fast and responsive is to bypass wordpress entirely.
You don't need to do anything complex - just install wp-super-cache, set a long timeout, and most importantly add the .htaccess rules it generates to bypass wordpress entirely and serve the cached static files directly.
You don't need to do anything complex - just install wp-super-cache, set a long timeout, and most importantly add the .htaccess rules it generates to bypass wordpress entirely and serve the cached static files directly.