By Joel Dare - Written October 3, 2025
My build process is taking about 45 seconds and waiting for it is becoming excruciating.
Fourty-five seconds doesn’t seem like that long but it’s like watching paint dry. I’m just waiting for the latest article to appear in my index. I look at it because sometimes I make mistakes. For the last article I wrote I forgot to hit save on the index.md file.
My blog is relatively simple. It’s a bunch of markdown files. I also have a layout. I publish it on GitHub and use GitHub pages to host the content. I’m a longtime paid user on the lowest tier. When I upload it uses Jekyll to build the files, but this all happens under the hood, I don’t usually need to know much about how it works.
But, it feels like it’s getting slower and slower over time. In a way, this blog post will serve as a snapshot to help me understand if it’s really getting slower. I can look back at this in a year or two to get a feel for how this is trending. Assuming I haven’t moved away from GitHub Actions by then.
Most of the time seems to be spent waiting in a queue.
It’s one of those problems that’s painful, but not so painful that I’m sure I should spend the time fixing it. Here are a few options I’m considering for fixing the problem.
So far, I haven’t taken enough time to figure out how to install and configure Jekyll to run locally instead of on GitHub. I think both of the first two options would require that.
This is part of the reason I created the Minimark application, but it doesn’t translate perfectly to my blog. I’ll need to tweak a few things. The biggest difference is that GitHub does some fancy URL handling. This goes a little bit against my minimalist approach.
I should also acknowledge that some of my problem is that I don’t carefully read everything that git says in the console. I probably should notice that I didn’t save my index.md file before I push.
What do you do to make your simple builds faster?
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