I just took over development of an existing EE website and am new to the cms and to blog development as well. First thing I noticed was that the site performed really poorly, so I just started doing some profiling using XDebug. I noticed that the query count is around 550. Is this normal? I know that it all comes down to what kind of queries are being run etc.. but I’m used to much lower numbers using other frameworks, but like I said: I’m new to blog development.
TLDR: What is the average ballpark query count for an EE homepage?
Thanks!
On my test install of EE2, an empty template pulls 13 queries (these have to do with sessions, tracking, grabbing the template, etc). Beyond that, there's no "average", as the amount of content can vary so widely from site-to-site.
550 queries is certainly outlandish. My guess would be that there are multiple embeds, several Channel Entries loops, and perhaps some Playa fields within those (Playa is a bit of a query monster).
I'd suggest turning on the Output Profiler to see where the load is coming from (Admin → System Administration → Output and Debugging).
Then, make sure you're making use of tag caching on your Channel Entries and other tags, and consider looking at a third-party caching solution such as CE Cache.
You can also disable some of the default tracking to save on queries (Admin → Security and Privacy → Tracking Preferences).