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We made some changes a month ago to make the site faster and general SEO fixes. Right after we did, Google said our site was taking 2-3x as long to download a page and slowed the crawling of our site. Previously we were at 30k pages a day and now are at 4000. its also been on a decline.

The "time spent downloading a page" has increased from 150MS to 300MS. I thought this was about site speed (which was a head scratcher since we are faster than before) but it turns out its http connections as per Neil Patel https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-search-console-crawl-stats/. The only think that could have increased http connections was possibly adding schema since there are not a bunch of https://schema.org on the page but truthfully that doesn't make any sense to me.

Has anyone ever run into this? What could be the cause?

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  • When you increased your site speed, what did you work on? Did you work on the speed of the initial HTML page, or did you work on the time to render the page? Did you make tradeoffs where you made one of those slower to make the other faster? – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Dec 21 '18 at 23:25
  • Thanks Stephen. So we worked on the overall spend and rendering time. The initial html download has Decreased as well....although it’s not great due to the web application. We were at .7 seconds down to .4. I am looking at caching the html via a crm which will cache by device type. Cloudflare does it but it’s 1k. We reorganized a lot of js so it is only on the right page and implemented schema. Based on the neil patel article I thought that maybe google read schema as additional http connections but doubt it. – Matt Dec 22 '18 at 19:15
  • I am also happy to share the url if that helps. – Matt Dec 22 '18 at 19:17
  • @Matt yes, share the url, it will help. I very doubt, that after you maked the site loading time faster, Google alerts you about increasing crawl times... Any metric, which is relevant for the crawling time, should be worsen. – Evgeniy Dec 27 '18 at 9:25
  • Somebody else with a similar problem: Dramatic increase in time spent downloading a page and barely no pages crawled per day – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Dec 30 '18 at 12:11

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