## **🕐 What Is a Normal Audit Duration?**

Most site audits complete within **10–45 minutes** for small to medium static sites, with sites of a few dozen to a few hundred pages often finishing in **5–15 minutes**. Large static sites with several thousand URLs typically take **1–3 hours**, while JavaScript-rendered crawls usually take **12–24 hours** (longer for very large sites).

## **📋 Common Reasons an Audit Takes Longer**

If your audit is taking significantly longer than usual — for example, an hour instead of five minutes — one or more of the following factors is likely the cause:

- **Large site size:** Websites with a high number of pages, subdomains, or deeply nested URL structures require more time to fully crawl.
- **Slow server response times:** If your web server responds slowly to requests, the crawler must wait longer at each page, extending the overall crawl time.
- **Crawl budget limits:** Some servers throttle or rate-limit automated crawlers. Search Atlas respects these limits to avoid impacting your site's performance, which can slow the audit down.
- **Redirects and redirect chains:** A high volume of redirects — especially chains of three or more hops — adds processing time at each URL.
- **JavaScript-heavy pages:** Sites that rely heavily on client-side JavaScript rendering require additional processing per page.
- **Temporary server or network issues:** Intermittent connectivity problems on your hosting provider's side can cause the crawler to pause and retry multiple times.
- **First-time or re-configured audit:** If this is the first audit for a domain, or if settings were recently changed, the system performs a more thorough baseline crawl which takes longer.

## **✅ What You Can Do Right Now**

1. **Wait for the audit to complete.** A longer crawl is not necessarily a failed one. If the progress indicator is still moving, the audit is still running. Give it additional time before taking action.
2. **Check your site's availability.** Open your website in a browser and confirm pages are loading normally. A site that is down or returning errors will cause the crawler to retry repeatedly.
3. **Review your crawl settings.** Navigate to your audit settings and confirm the crawl depth and page limit are appropriate for your site size. Reducing the crawl depth can significantly speed up future audits.
4. **Avoid running multiple audits simultaneously.** Triggering a new audit while one is already in progress can cause delays or conflicts. Wait for the current audit to finish first.

## **🔄 When to Restart an Audit**

If the audit has shown **no progress for more than 60 minutes** and your site is confirmed to be online and responsive, it is safe to cancel the current audit and start a new one. Note that audits stalled for more than 60 minutes are automatically detected and re-queued, and on a standard-sized site an audit still processing after 24–48 hours may be stuck. Use the same crawl configuration to ensure consistent results.

## **📊 Checking Site Health After the Audit**

Once your audit completes, you can review the full results under **Left sidebar → Site Metrics (Site Explorer)**. This section gives you an overview of technical issues, page health scores, and crawl data that can help explain any slowdowns — such as a high number of redirect chains or server errors discovered during the crawl.

## **💡 Tips to Keep Future Audits Fast**

- Set a reasonable **page crawl limit** that matches your site's actual size.
- Fix redirect chains — aim for direct 301 redirects with no more than one hop.
- Ensure your **robots.txt** file is not accidentally blocking pages you want audited.
- Keep your hosting server response time under 200ms where possible.
- Schedule audits during off-peak traffic hours to avoid server throttling.

## **🛠️ Still Seeing Unusually Long Audits?**

If your audit consistently takes far longer than expected even after applying the steps above, our team can investigate whether there is a platform-side issue or a specific configuration problem with your domain. If you need further assistance, open the chat widget in the bottom-right corner of the platform and type **human teammate** to be connected with a member of our team.