That's exactly how a site I work on operates. True, changing a link across all pages is a very slow operation (about 50 seconds for 11,000 pages) but a) that's

That's exactly how a site I work on operates. True, changing a link across all pages is a very slow operation (about 50 seconds for 11,000 pages) but a) that's happening in a highly structured and powerful but resource-intensive way (i.e. DOM parsing) b) it happens so rarely that I haven't bothered to optimise it. The main trade-off for an update that happens maybe once every 1-2 months taking 50 seconds is that every single page load is faster. There are other benefits from static files, too - it's much easier to work with content in flat files, 1-per-page, than the kind of complicated database / file / code relationship used by many 'normal' CMSes.