diff --git a/docs/dev_guides/changing_splink/contributing_to_docs.md b/docs/dev_guides/changing_splink/contributing_to_docs.md
index 062f53bf0e..f7dda2e40f 100644
--- a/docs/dev_guides/changing_splink/contributing_to_docs.md
+++ b/docs/dev_guides/changing_splink/contributing_to_docs.md
@@ -14,6 +14,22 @@ This is much faster than waiting for GitHub actions to run if you're trying to m
 
 Once you've finished updating Splink documentation we ask that you run our spellchecker. Instructions on how to do this are given below.
 
+## Quick builds for rapidly authoring new content
+
+When you `mkdocs serve -v --dirtyreload` or `mkdocs build` the documentation, the `mkdocs` command will rebuild the entire site. This can be slow if you're just making small changes to a single page.
+
+To speed up the process, you can temporarily tell `mkdocs` to ignore content by modifying `mkdocs.yml`, for example by adding:
+
+```yml
+exclude_docs: |
+  dev_guides/**
+  charts/**
+  topic_guides/**
+  demos/**
+  blog/**
+```
+
+
 ## Spellchecking docs
 
 When updating Splink documentation, we ask that you run our spellchecker before submitting a pull request. This is to help ensure quality and consistency across the documentation. If for whatever reason you can't run the spellchecker on your system, please don't let this prevent you from contributing to the documentation. Please note, the spellchecker _only works on markdown files_.
@@ -30,7 +46,7 @@ To run the spellchecker on either a single markdown file or folder of markdown f
 ./scripts/pyspelling/spellchecker.sh <path_to_file_or_folder>
 ```
 
-Omitting the file/folder path will run the spellchecker on all markdown files contained in the `docs` folder. We recommend running the spellchecker only on files that you have created or edited. 
+Omitting the file/folder path will run the spellchecker on all markdown files contained in the `docs` folder. We recommend running the spellchecker only on files that you have created or edited.
 
 The spellchecker uses the Python package [PySpelling](https://facelessuser.github.io/pyspelling/) and its underlying spellchecking tool, Aspell. Running the above script will automatically install these packages along with any other necessary dependencies.
 
@@ -56,9 +72,9 @@ Please correct any mistakes found or update the custom dictionary to ensure the
 
 
 
-   
 
- 
+
+