Why choose a static website?
Static websites and blogs are not suitable for all use cases, but have a number of benefits. Because there is no interaction between a runtime code language such as PHP and a relational database such as MySQL there is minimal server side processing required to serve the response back to the web browser. This means Static Sites are extremely fast to load and become usable.
Security
Because there is no underlying language abstraction or database, the attack surface area is quite small. The code on disk can be set to read only permissions, making a web based attack vector difficult - with a successful exploit required “higher in the food chain” via a privilege escalation or compromise of another secret - password, API or SSH keys.
Cost
A notable benefit to static sites is the cost to host them - this can range from free on GitHub to very low cost when leveraging an S3 bucket, possibly with a CDN such as CloudFront or CloudFlare in front.
Scalability
All espects of a static site (HTML code, JavaScript, CSS, fonts and images) can be fully cached, a CDN can be employed to guard against DDoS and other attacks as well as serve the site from a low latency node nearest to the user. The scalability of a static site running on a single server is typically hundreds or thousands of times higher than a dynamic site, and this is enhanced by leveraging CDN services.
Jekyll is a tool for transforming your plain text into static websites and blogs. It is simple, static, and blog-aware. Jekyll uses the Liquid templating language and has builtin Markdown and Textile support.
Learn more about Jekyll on their website.