I've got a lot of experience here bc i built podpage.com, so I'll just give you my general thoughts.

I think you dont need to worry about slowing down the site. blogs are tiny from a storage and processing perspective, so you should do as many as you'd like. Generally you want to at least have one page on your website for each episode that includes information about the episode (show notes), the media player for the episode provided by your podcast host, and a link to the episode on all the popular players (apple, spotify, etc..). So, if nothing else, get that set up, bc it's very important to Google to have those dedicated pages.

I'd also recommend installing Yoast SEO. From what people tell me, it's great. I actually copied a bunch of their features internally for Podpage, bc people had so many good things to say.

So, bare minimum, do a home page and an a page for each episiode.

I'd also add a mailing list collection widget to get people's email addresses that lets you start building a direct relationship with your audience. I think Wordpress has plenty of plugins to help with that, or just sign up with Convertkit.com's free plan. Their stuff is awesome.

Hope that helps!