Im not sure if this is the correct forum for this as I am not entirely sure what it is as that is the question im asking (hope that makes sense, lol).. Anyways.. When visiting websites, some of them give you information on how many Queries happened when you visited, for example, something like this: "Queries: 26 queries".. What does this mean? and What are "Queries"?
It's information that should be turned off when a site goes live - shows how many requests were sent to the database to build the page you are looking at. A large number of queries can mean the site slows down.
Is there a way of finding out how many my own site does? and Can I then do things to lower this number which will then increase my site loading speed?
Yes and No, don't fret about it. depending on the software your site runs the info may be available otherwise you'd need to add in the counter. small sites with small databases aren't going to experience any impact from extra queries. Again, depending on the software you run you may be able to change the code to run fewer queries but you may get just as much benefit from optimising the tables and the indexes and tweaking the table types. This forum has had a lot of work done on the queries but it's a huge forum that's been running 9 years with text field searches. Most websites don't have that kind of data to wade through.