I recently moved my blog from Drupal to static html pages and the results are amazing.

I am primarily a Drupal developer, and have been for about 10 years, so many years ago when I decided to add a blog to my personal site it was natural to choose Drupal. Drupal was easy to get a blog up and running quite easy and worked well, little consideration was given to actual site speed.
Fast forward about 8 years to the present day where mobiles are used so much more to browse the web and where site speed is so critical, using Drupal as my blog platform was a bit of a let down as far as speed is concerned. I wasn't using any sort of external caching and didn't intend to as really, it shouldn't be needed for a simple blog... time for a change.

I decided it was time to move to static html pages as really, I am the only one updating the pages and no real CMS is needed.
After testing a couple of static site generators I decided on Metalsmith. It seemed to be quite easy to use and easy to write plugins for, although I did have a little trouble with plugins as the order in which the plugins are run in the build script does matter and can be a little fiddly to get right.

As you can see from the images below of site spoeed tests using pagespeed insights and webpagetest.org, the results are very good. it seems the only thing stopping the site from reaching 100% on pagespeed insights is the google analytics script.

One let down from moving from a CMS to static pages is commenting. I did try adding Disqus, but the amount of JS it inserts into the page and the load time was too high/long for me to accept, aswell as the fact that it allows them to add advertising to the site.
I may in the future add my own commenting implementation in the future.

Below are screen grabs of the speed tests of the static site.