Why a scan is slow or times out
Most scans finish quickly, but larger or slower sites can take longer or occasionally time out. This article explains why and what you can do.
Why scans take time
The Full Site Audit and other scanning tools crawl your pages one by one. Several factors affect speed:
- Site size. More pages means more to crawl.
- Server response time. If your server is slow to respond, each page takes longer.
- Rate limiting. Some servers throttle crawlers, slowing the audit.
- Heavy pages. Large pages with lots of resources take longer to analyze.
For big or slow sites, a crawl can take several minutes, and SEO Roger may sample pages rather than crawl every single one. The report will note when this happens.
If a scan is slow
- Wait a bit longer. Large sites legitimately take several minutes.
- Check your server load. If your site is under heavy traffic or on constrained hosting, crawls slow down.
- Re-run during off-peak hours when your server has more capacity.
If a scan times out
- Re-run the audit. Temporary slowness often clears on a second attempt.
- Confirm your site is reachable and returning normal status codes; use the free HTTP Status tool to check.
- Review crawl blockers. An overly strict robots.txt or firewall rule can stall crawlers.
Getting more complete results
- Make sure your server isn't rate-limiting the crawler.
- Fix pages returning errors or timeouts, which the free Link Checker and HTTP Status tools can help identify.
- Improve on heavy templates; the free tool highlights opportunities.
A note on very large sites
On very large sites, sampling is expected and still gives a representative health picture. Focus on the patterns and high-severity issues surfaced rather than expecting every URL to be listed.
If scans consistently time out despite a healthy, reachable site, contact support through the help center with your site URL so the team can investigate.
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