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?