Boosting your website’s speed can significantly enhance how often and how efficiently Google crawls your site. This ties directly into what Google refers to as your “crawl budget.”
What Is Crawl Budget?
Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot is willing and able to crawl on your site within a certain period. It’s determined by two key factors:
- Crawl Rate Limit: The maximum number of requests per second Googlebot will make without overwhelming your server.
- Crawl Demand: How much Google wants to crawl your site, based on factors such as site popularity, how frequently your content changes, and its relevance.
How Site Speed Impacts Crawl Rate
Googlebot is engineered to respect your server’s limits. If your site loads quickly and handles requests efficiently, Googlebot recognizes that it can crawl more pages without causing performance issues.
- Faster Site = Higher Crawl Rate: A quick, responsive site allows Googlebot to fetch more pages in less time, making better use of your crawl budget.
- Slow Site = Lower Crawl Rate: If your server is slow or unreliable (e.g., frequent timeouts or 5xx errors), Googlebot will back off to avoid overloading it, resulting in fewer crawled pages.
So, you do want to make sure that besides having fast, optimized, and clean code, your website is hosted on a reliable and fast server – and that’s exactly what UltimateWB delivers. The website builder is designed with performance in mind, generating clean, efficient code that loads quickly and runs smoothly. Paired with UltimateWB’s Web Hosting and Cloud plans, which run on lightning-fast servers using the latest technology like SSDs and advanced caching, you get a powerful combination that maximizes speed, reliability, and overall performance for your website.
Read: What’s the Best Website Builder for SEO?
Why Increased Crawl Frequency Matters
- Faster Indexing of New Content: New pages or blog posts appear in Google Search more quickly.
- Quicker Updates in Search Results: Changes to existing content are reflected sooner.
- Efficient Crawling of Large Sites: For sites with thousands or millions of pages, speed helps ensure high-priority pages get crawled and indexed without wasting crawl budget on less important ones.
Final Thoughts
While crawl budget isn’t typically a concern for small to mid-sized sites, it becomes increasingly important for large, dynamic websites (e.g., e-commerce platforms, news publishers, etc.). Improving site speed not only enhances user experience – a known ranking factor – but also makes your site easier and more efficient for Google to crawl.
In short, a faster site leads to more frequent and comprehensive crawling, helping your content show up in search results sooner and more reliably.
Are you ready to design & build your own website? Learn more about UltimateWB! We also offer web design packages if you would like your website designed and built for you.
Got a techy/website question? Whether it’s about UltimateWB or another website builder, web hosting, or other aspects of websites, just send in your question in the “Ask David!” form. We will email you when the answer is posted on the UltimateWB “Ask David!” section.