Jeff,
I am a novice, but I am learning. Let me give you an idea what I was thinking about and you tell me if this makes sense.
If I update my index.html file, I upload it and everything is fine. The index.html calls upon several pages and updates automatically. If I put this index.html file in a directory say... (www.mysite.com/dontgohere/index.html) and I make a cron job look at that file and run it, then dump the page as a visitor would see in html into the file (www.mysite.com/index.html). Then when someone accesses my main page, it is just a html file and shouldn't be slow.
Does this sound like it would work?
Thanks
Dean