300 Minutes a Month: Cutting My Eleventy Netlify Build Time in Half

A couple of months ago I wrote about making my Eleventy build five times faster by fixing a handful of embarrassing filters. I wrote about developer experience and the feedback loop of "I write a line" and "I see the result." Why am I writing a sequel already? Well, the answer is money. Or more accurately, keeping things free. I'm on Netlify's legacy free plan, which gives me 300 build minutes a month. Right now, despite my previous optimizations, the build time averages around 2 minutes, 45 seconds. If I'm committing and building the site once a day (and I usually am more often than that), then I'm getting too close to that free limit. What can I optimize? The answers are far more Netlify-centric this time around, rather than just about 11ty. An Unused Webhook Before optimizing, I looked for what I could delete outright. The fastest build minute is the one you never spend. I had a Discord webhook integration, a shell script and a Netlify Function, that pinged a Discord channel…