How to Optimize Hugo Build Time for Large Websites?

[tysonzach]

Hello there,

I have been working on a project using Hugo; and it is been great so far. Although, I have started to run into performance issues when building my site. The site has grown quite large with numerous pages, and the build times are becoming noticeably slower, especially when generating content heavy pages and processing a significant number of images.

I am looking for strategies or best practices to optimize the build time for large Hugo sites. Specifically, I am wondering if there are any configuration tweaks, build steps, or Hugo features I might not be fully utilizing. For example, I have heard that the ignoreCache flag can help, but I am not sure how it interacts with content or whether there are other caching strategies to consider.

Thanks in advance for your help and assistance.

[tyco]

Check this page on performance.

Performance

Also check

Configure segments

Also see

Building a site with 50,000 pages taking a very long time

If you’re building your site within an IDE (e.g, Microsoft VS Code, etc.), the built-in file watcher can have am impact on build time. If that’s the case, terminate your IDE and build the site from a terminal. And if you haven’t done so arleady, look at the template metrics: hugo --templateMetrics --templateMetricsHints

Lastly, ensure you have enough resources like RAM to run your site. Hugo’s image processing can slow site build time if there are a lot of images. You might consider offloading that to external services like Cloudflare Images.

[davidsneighbour]

A region where performance issues often occur IMHO is pagination and related content. Reducing/Optimizing that in connection with caching will remove a lot of time.

[jmooring]

@davidsneighbour

A region where performance issues often occur IMHO is pagination and related content.

Not to put too sharp an edge on this but… prove it.

Performance issues with the embedded pagination template were resolved several years ago, and the Related method on a Pages object is very efficient.

[bep]

@tysonzach

generating content heavy pages and processing a significant number of images.

As to images, my number one tip is to understand the file cache.

[bep]

@davidsneighbour

related content.

The built-in Related Content feature in Hugo is pretty fast. But if you do some “manual related content” in the templates, you’re right.

In general, I would say that these 2 are the top 2 things to be aware of:

1. Ineffective templates, mostly related to quadratic loops. Home grown “related content” templates is one typical example. These should be easy to spot using the ----templateMetrics flags.
2. IO (writing data to disk). So if you have 100K pages you should try to be careful not adding to many taxonomy varitants, if you paginate, having a reasonable page size etc. Having a fast disk also helps.