As long as you don't have functionality that relys on it though, like search. I've seen that used to DOS a site before. And pingbacks. Sometimes even comments (though to be fair, you can turn those off for parity with a static site).

Plus you'd probably want to do the caching up a layer and not rely on a plugin, maybe a varnish cache or Fast-CGI cache which adds complexity and cache invalidation etc etc. W3TC and ilk are good, but to get the most from them you need to have good control over the server environment, especially for object store, and you probably want to integrate them with varnish server or something anyway. And before that even just for running the site you'll need to tune php and mysql. Not to mention 'fully' warming the cache on a large dynamic site can take quite a while, if it can be done at all.

Something like Hugo can output thousands of pages in milliseconds. That kind of performance just can't be found in a dynamic site, so warming the cache will always take longer than generating a static site like that.

I guess there's just more to be aware of.

> So it's literally just the desire to have a zero-footprint blog.

I don't disagree but I'd say it probably goes further than that. It's just so simple to go static. If you really dig into hosting a dynamic site there is a lot to do to make it work well under most conditions.

> Sounds like you should build a WP plugin that generates a static/exportable site.

There are actually a few good ones out there. I just used on to archive a site. Wget was flaking out with converting srcset urls (even when I compiled the 1.19 branch which was supposed to fix it) so I used a plugin to export the site.

Overall, I don't really promote one over the other, they're tools at the end of the day and if one works for a workflow then it's the best!