@Stephen Cronin -[D]oes anyone have an opinion on using WordPress to create static sites using one of these [static-page] plugins:

Yes. I've worked over the last couple years getting familiar with Apache and managing a server-environment (Windows & Ubuntu). I am interested to serve a website from my home-computer. I think we are approaching the point at which this will be generally feasible; of special interest in certain segments, and could create a nice stir.

In my particular case, there is the complication that I have a very slow 256K DSL connection. Uploads at 128K. On the face of it, that alone makes the idea 'a little crazy'.

But, the general idea does certainly entail resource-limits, and extra attention to resource-management is intrinsically a key part of the game.

(I have a nice local ISP, who help many local businesses either manage their sites on their own machines at their own premises, or host their entire environments on the ISP's physical local facilities. They knew exactly 'who I was & where I was headed', when I started asking about a Static IP, and connectivity/storage matters. They would eg give me a T1 line at a good price (at their facilities), if traffic came to that. (Which it does, for certain users, notably eg those into sex imagery.))

I started trawling WordPress extent for caching solutions that emphasized speed, and soon noticed the offerings for static HTML conversions that were not explicitly about caching.

Like many others, I wrote HTML pages and created websites by hand for many years. Likewise, I/we lived for a long time with dialup connections (56K in 'theory', often lucky to sustain 28K). I created - and remote hosted - several websites totally designed to be served to visitors with 28K connections, and less.

Sooo ... why are we looking at static sites, static pages, and HTML caching? If the motivation is to evade a putative complexity-problem with WordPress, there are dozens, hundreds, probably thousands of nice little scripts for making nice little HTML sites, and this line of inquiry should shift forthrightly to that category of software-solution.

Buuut ... it's impossible not to notice, that many cache-solutions, and virtually all of the HTML-conversion plugins, move promptly to discussions of the DRAMATIC speed-enhancements that they readily achieve. That of course is how I got drawn into studying them.

Yes, some of these plugins seem to create a website that no longer needs WordPress at all, which would then be an "actual" simplification. But notice that the key complexity-complaints often focus on the Admin and Editor elements of WP, which those who are ostensibly after simplicity would have to first use & tolerate, before they could use one of these plugins to convert their "dynamic" site to a "static" site.

Yes, I am underwhelmed by the simplicity-argument.

But if it's speed you want (and reduced server-loading), this avenue does indeed deliver the goods. Big Time.

(Let me mention, for completeness, that there are definitely other important factors in designing & creating pages, for maximum speed & minimum resource-usage. Stomp out the scripting. Watch the image-sizes & numbers like a hawk. Control page-size - break content into pieces. Etc, etc.

Caching schemes and static generators will happily work on a 'bloat-in, bloat-out' basis. In the old days, we aimed to make pages under 50K. Interestingly, the 'Rise of Mobile' now recreates some of the limits/pressures that pertained, under Dialup ... an intriguing topic in its own right.)