I started my blog about python/django (https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com) using Jekyll and hosting on Github Pages and it was pretty good to get started because back then I wasn't sure if I would keep it up or not.

After a year or so I migrated to a 5 USD droplet on Digital Ocean (back then GH Pages didn't offer https for custom domains) and integrated with Github webhooks to automate the deployment when pushing new markdown to the main branch.

Over the time it indeed started to degrade. The build time takes almost a minute, but after building the website is just a bunch of static html pages.

Nowadays it is annoying to write new posts because I like to write locally and refresh to browser to check if it's looking good or not. So I would say it degraded for me but for the reader it's still as fast as it was when there was just a couple of posts.

I thought about migrating the blog to something else, but because I used some custom markdown extensions for code highlight and other things, it would be painful to migrate all the blog posts. So I've been postponing it since 2019.

Is it slow to regenerate a single post even with Jekyll’s ‘—incremental’ mode?

yes because of a bad design decision I made to create a custom "related posts", which is a code that searches all my markdowns to pick the best pages and add to the current page. so even with `--incremental` it take quite some time to regenerate

Find all posts related to "django", select the top 3, pin them as the related posts for all django entries? You'd trade out some uniqueness and slightly increased memory usage to gain speed.

(I just got started blogging and found https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite python static site generator worked well for me. Obviously you're probably a bit far in to switch horses by now.)