Why a Site Audit May Take Longer Than Expected# Link to this article

An audit that is still running is usually working correctly. Crawl time is dominated by how fast your site answers, not by how fast Rankato can ask.

The usual causes# Link to this section

• Server response time. Rankato adapts its request rate to your server. If pages take two seconds to return, a 5,000-page crawl cannot finish quickly without harming your site.
• JavaScript rendering. Rendering runs a real browser per page. It finds content a plain fetch would miss, and it is several times slower. Turn it off if your pages are server-rendered.
• robots.txt crawl-delay. If your robots file asks crawlers to wait between requests, Rankato obeys it. This is the single most common cause of a surprisingly long crawl.
• Page count. Faceted navigation, calendars and search pages can generate far more URLs than you expect.
• Redirect chains. Every hop is a request.

What to check# Link to this section

1. Open the crawl progress panel — it shows pages fetched, current rate, and the reason the crawler is waiting.
2. Look at Crawl Logs for repeated timeouts or 5xx responses.
3. Check your robots.txt for a Crawl-delay directive.

If progress has genuinely stopped rather than slowed, see My crawl is stuck or failed.