[imaginenore]

Why is it newsworthy? Smashing Magazine is a static website. Putting it on a CDN is the most obvious, most efficient, and the cheapest optimization.

The whole thing reads like a Netlify ad.

[scribu]

I agree that it feels like an ad campaign, especially since the CMS was on the front page recently.

The speed improvements could have been achieved without switching from WordPress, by installing a caching plugin with a CDN option.

[troymc]

If you read the article, you'll find that Smashing tried many different caching plugins for WordPress, and they all had problems.

[bobfunk]

It's also worth noting that Smashing Magazine is not just articles (and comments), but also a full E-commerce, job board, event page, ticket checkout and introduced a new membership section with subscriptions.

Obviously all of that can still be done with a static front-end today (and with one front-end instead of 4 different ones), but that's actually what's newsworthy and it's hardly what anyone would traditionally think of as a "static website" :)