'Visual Studios - Ignore publish for files (but not delete from server)

Is it possible to configure certain folders to not be included in publish in Visual studio but not get deleted from the server where they were published previously? I ask because my publish is slow and I want to speed it up. I will likely hardly ever make changes in a certain folder and need to publish again so I want the publish when done to ignore those files. It's a lot of files in a certain folder and I see the publish scanning through them all and it's not necessary each time.



Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source