I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes

A few months ago, I worked on improving the performance of my website for end-users and visitors. But I've also come to realize I needed to look at the build and rendering of the site, as the initial boot of my dev server (and production server) has become absurdly sluggish. I'd run npm start, brew coffee in my Chemex, come back, and it'd just be finishing. I told myself it's no big deal, nobody sees it except me and it's only the startup. Incremental builds are fast so I just suffered through it. The thing is though, the fixes were embarrassingly simple once I actually looked at what was happening. Come explore my novice computer science skills with me! 😄 Eleventy prints benchmark data at the end of every build if anything is slow enough to measure. I'd often just skim past it. This time I paid attention: [11ty] Benchmark 8937ms 64% 222× (Configuration) "lastModified" Nunjucks Filter [11ty] Copied 286 Wrote 413 files in 13.99 seconds Eight and a half seconds on a single filter! Out…