My recipe blog Food I Made is kind of my playground for all my random static site generation ideas as well as a place for me to share my recipes and food photography.

One thing that bothered me recently is that as I was adding more content to my site builder and adding more interdependent links, the build time on my jekyll pages was creeping up to about 30 seconds.

 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 35.816 seconds.

One method I read about was to use a plugin called jekyll-include-cache. These are the steps that I took to use this plugin on my blog.

1. Verify that this plugin is usable on github pages

The first thing I wanted to check before I invested any resources in this is if my hosting provider for jekyll, Github Pages, would support this plugin. You don’t want to go down too far of a rabbit hole investigating this locally if it won’t even work on the hosting provider. It takes a little digging, but you can find all the supported gems for github pages here. They keep this list pretty trim for security reasons, but they are whitelisting new plugins all the time as they become popular. As you can see from this history, this is an older plugin and they actually whitelisted it about 2 years ago, which is a great sign that this is a widely used plugin that isn’t going anywhere.

2. Update my build process

To get started then, I update my local repository in the following ways.

To my site’s Gemfile, I add gem 'jekyll-include-cache'

To my site’s _config.yml file I update the plugins: section to include ` plugins:

• jekyll-include-cache

3. Identify and update all includes

I then tried to find all files in my jekyll directory that use the include directive. Just to make sure I’m not overmatching I’m excluding directories I know I don’t need to modify, such as my generated directory _site. I’m also making sure to include the space after include in my grep pattern so when I do replace these with include_cached I can keep rerunning the exact same command and not picking up the lines that I’ve already fixed.

{% raw  %}
   find . -type f -not -path "_site/" | xargs grep '{% include '
{% endraw %}

4. Make sure that all includes don’t reference page or local variables

One note you should make sure you do when you switch to include_cached is that you have to make sure your include templates don’t reference any page or local variables. You can pass variables to your templates and reference them within the template as include.name.

5. Verify improvements!

By making this switch, and updating a few files, I immediately saw huge performance improvements generating my static jekyll site. My build time is down from over 30 seconds to just about 3 seconds. Even better, if I only modify one file that doesn’t have too many dependencies, the generation time to update can be under 1 second if I have the incremental flag on.

 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 3.039 seconds.

Written by Will who lives and works in New York. You should follow him on Twitter.