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 l…