[timpera]

It's WordPress, which is a great CMS but can quickly crumble under load when using cheap hosting.

[andix]

With an external cache/CDN it should work perfectly fine.

There are also some caching plugins for wordpress, but most of them still hit the database on every request.

[yanis_t]

So I assume it's because it's not statically build, but requires a DB connection all the time?

[timpera]

Yes, with the recent waves of AI scrapers I have noticed on my own WordPress websites that the DB seems to the weak point when under load. Cache plugins can help a lot with this.