How to speed up a website on DLE?

Question

MySQL

Good evening!
Stupid site on DLE, where about 12,000 news.
It loads in 1-2 seconds. Only the cache helps. But it is necessary to speed up requests too.
Normal requests are loaded in 1-1.5 seconds. Also a lot.
Queries such as:

regexp '(" . $cats . ")
и
where (category LIKE '%$cats%')
и
where MATCH (category) AGAINST ('$cats')

Where $cats is a genre (word), for example "action movie".
The table is stored like this: "action movie, drama, crime."
Can you please tell me how to speed up the site? And which of these 3 is the most optimal to use, as a speed.
Thank you!

Answer 1

it's best to move $cats to a separate table with ID
and create a link table: for movie ID and category ID.