Slow Mac mini 2014

I bought a base model 2014 Mac mini about a year ago. It's always been slow, as I recall. It's really bugging me these days, so I decided to get on with solving the problem. I waited long enough that warranty and free apple support are probably lapsed...

I'm running macOS High Sierra v10.13.3. It has 1.4GHz i5, with the basic 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 memory.

Three examples of slow performance, even if these are the first applications I use:

• Launching Pages v6.3.1 from the launchpad takes about 7s from click --> selection of document templates to use to create a new file.
• Launching Word v16.10 (through an Office 365 subscription) takes about a minute.
• Running Etrecheck warns that the report is unusually slow.

Here are some relevant captures from console:

I've read some materials online about it's the hard drive. It might be, and I'd be willing to go through the work of building up a SSD as a boot disk, and installing it. Before I do that, I'd like to see if there are simpler ways to improve this...

Etrecheck 4 gave me some info too. I don't want to just dump it onto the forum unless it will be useful.

Any suggestions?