For a “personal website” or any relatively simple static content site, the DB should not be getting hit much at all. Cache is your friend. For my sites I have a map of all relevant queries and when we do updates we run the relevant queries one time and cache them to both memory and file system.

Should being the operative word. In practice it's both easy and common to have a database do unnecessary work when generating a page, a problem that often only rears its head when under unusual load.