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.
The whole thing reads like a Netlify ad.
The speed improvements could have been achieved without switching from WordPress, by installing a caching plugin with a CDN option.
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" :)