There is no support for comments in the blog and no pictures at all. No images, no thumbnails, no banner, no logo, no favicon.
Also, no share button. No top/recommended articles. No view counter.
Once you start adding medias it will be quite a bit slower. Once you start implementing basic features expected by users (comments and related articles for a blog) it's gonna be yet again slower.
I remember when my first article went viral out of the blue, I think have to thank the (useless) share buttons for that. Then it did 1TB of network traffic over the next days, largely due to a pair of GIF. That's how bad pictures can be.
> no banner, no logo, no favicon...Also, no share button. No top/recommended articles. No view counter.
All of which I can live without.
Still the best way of sharing content on the web is via a url, which is handily provided, so most of these aren't even needed. As for recommended and view counts, these don't inherently add a lot of value to users. If anything, it's a nice change to have a page that doesn't try and infer my desires for once.
I agree that the comparison is poor - there are business where those media components are required. But an issue with the modern web is that everything has all those components - nobody[1] cried over the lack of a "Share to Facebook" button on CNN. So, while saying stripping out all those components would solve the problem is inaccurate since those components are part of the business requirement - chances are a lot of those components aren't. Maybe you don't still need that "Share to Digg" button or maybe, as a news site, you don't need a comments section - I think it's a mix of both. Websites are being written unreasonably burdened with unnecessary features and those features are usually implemented with out-of-the-box poorly performing JS.
(As an aside - nobody nobody has ever derived value out of a page counter except the owner of the site - who could just look it up in the logs. This isn't really an argument against anything you mentioned but I found it amusing it was one of the things you brought up)
1. Mostly nobody - sure there were some folks, but then again I'd wager a significant portion of those folks were just loud voices echoing from the marketing department.
My own blog is statically generated too. I don’t have most of these either, because as a user I barely care about any of them or even actively dislike them.
Also, no share button. No top/recommended articles. No view counter.
Once you start adding medias it will be quite a bit slower. Once you start implementing basic features expected by users (comments and related articles for a blog) it's gonna be yet again slower.
I remember when my first article went viral out of the blue, I think have to thank the (useless) share buttons for that. Then it did 1TB of network traffic over the next days, largely due to a pair of GIF. That's how bad pictures can be.