diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 6b70d27d..9fe3eb8d 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -93,6 +93,8 @@ This will start a webserver on the default settings (http://localhost:8000) and
 
 If Chrome or Chromium is installed then by default it will open in that in App Mode (with the `--app` cmdline flag), regardless of what the OS's default browser is set to (it is possible to override this behaviour).
 
+If you have large amounts of .html or .js files, eel.init() might take up a long time to scan those files for exposed functions. By passing a list of paths to the init function's exclude_path parameter you can exclude these files from being scanned.  
+
 ### App options
 
 Additional options can be passed to `eel.start()` as keyword arguments.
diff --git a/eel/__init__.py b/eel/__init__.py
index fd09b45b..cd5a45e2 100644
--- a/eel/__init__.py
+++ b/eel/__init__.py
@@ -111,7 +111,7 @@ def decorator(function: Callable[..., Any]) -> Any:
 
 
 def init(path: str, allowed_extensions: List[str] = ['.js', '.html', '.txt', '.htm',
-                                   '.xhtml', '.vue'], js_result_timeout: int = 10000) -> None:
+                                   '.xhtml', '.vue'], exclude_path: List[str] = [], js_result_timeout: int = 10000) -> None:
     global root_path, _js_functions, _js_result_timeout
     root_path = _get_real_path(path)
 
@@ -121,6 +121,10 @@ def init(path: str, allowed_extensions: List[str] = ['.js', '.html', '.txt', '.h
             if not any(name.endswith(ext) for ext in allowed_extensions):
                 continue
 
+            # exclude specific file paths to increase loading speed on initialisation
+            if any(exclude in os.path.join(root, name) for exclude in exclude_path):
+                continue
+
             try:
                 with open(os.path.join(root, name), encoding='utf-8') as file:
                     contents = file.read()