> Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.

It shouldn't be that slow. Did you enable Jetpack caching and such?

WordPress sites can be lightning fast if cached well. I forget what the WordPress.com options are, but if you host on Pantheon, Wpengine or similar, it can be very very fast.

You can also self-host on Cloudways (managed WordPress containers), now owned by DigitalOcean, or use Gridpane to deploy it to any VPS with a dashboard.

> I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files

(Disclaimer: I work for one) Headless CMSes can often do this, but usually you have to bring your own frontend. Astro makes this setup pretty easy to maintain (it all works together and is maintained by a single vendor). Of course Next would work too but it's much more complicated. You'd still have to manage the frontend though :(

There might be a static generation plug in for WordPress too. I can't remember exactly.