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Our CI/CD Pipeline Took 24 Minutes. These 7 GitHub Actions Fixes Got It Under 7.
No new tools and no bigger runners. Just YAML changes you can copy into your repo today.
Here’s a habit I didn’t notice until it was everywhere on our team.
Someone pushes a commit. They open Slack. Then Reddit. Then they make coffee. Twenty-four minutes later the pipeline goes red because of a missing semicolon in a test file, and by then they’ve completely lost the thread of what they were doing.
That was us. A pretty normal Node.js API, a React frontend, a Docker image, and a GitHub Actions pipeline that had grown one “quick addition” at a time until nobody wanted to touch it.
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The usual answer to slow CI is “throw bigger runners at it.” We didn’t have the budget for that, and honestly, I don’t think it would have helped much. Bigger runners make slow work go a little faster. They don’t stop you from doing work you don’t need to do.
So I spent two afternoons on it. Here’s every change that made a real difference, in the order I’d do them again, with the YAML.
First, measure. Don’t guess.
Before changing anything, open your last 10 workflow runs and write down how long each step…
