How many WP_queries are too many WP_queries?

Hi guys.

I’m currently working a newspaper website project. I wanted to create a flexible front page design, one which can be modified in the backend.

So I settled on widgets. I set up about 5 different widget areas on the homepage. Users can drag and drop custom widgets into the different columns, to allow for a really neat way of having a fresh and dynamic site. I’ve set up a few different custom widgets to display articles and lists of articles.

Now my problem is primarily performance. According to get_num_queries() I’ve got over 230 queries and it takes 15 seconds to load. This is horrible, I know.

I would live with something so bad if I knew that I could just turn on W3 Total, but the editors often have to login daily to update content and caching just doesn’t work too well for logged in users.

Is this way too many queries? How much is too many? Any tips?

I’d be happy to show you guys examples of my code if you think it’d help.