We do run our own CDN at Netlify, and that's what allow us to serve the actual HTML pages out of edge caches while handling atomic deploys and instant cache invalidation.

This matters less when you test from New York (where Smashing Magazine hosts their Wordpress version of the site).

Here's how the performance difference looks like for people in Melbourne:

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dbYpJA/https://www.smashingmaga... https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/exYLwO/https://next.smashingmag...

The most important part of this difference comes from Netlify delivering the complete initial HTML in less than 100ms compared to more than 2 seconds wait time for the initial HTML load on the Wordpress version.

I'm sure Smashing will see an noticeable uptick in engagement in many parts of the world due to this (it's an effect we've seen before).

(PS. Movable Type's approach was awesome, but the infrastructure around doing static deploys and full static builds was just not up to the task back then, and browsers were way more primitive, so you would end up needing a monolithic dynamic site for just about anything with some form of user interacion)