Installing a caching plugin and turning it all the way up should solve most of your problems. There is no real need for every request to hit the DB.
Yep, the site already uses a caching plugin (w3TotalCache) and it is configured with memcached at the backend. Unfortunately, even with this the site still makes a couple of DB calls with each page load, but nowhere near as many as without the caching. Maybe I'll shove varnish in front of it too for good measure :joy:
https://portal.cloudunboxed.net/knowledgebase/33/Nginx-like-...