Improving Server Performance and Hosting to Enhance Crawl Rate

To improve server performance and hosting to enhance your website's crawl rate, focus primarily on reducing server response time and optimizing server resources. A fast, reliable server enables Googlebot to crawl more pages per session, speeding up indexing of new or updated content.

Key strategies include:

• Use reliable, fast web hosting: Prefer dedicated or high-quality hosting over shared hosting to avoid slow response times caused by resource contention. Hosting should be scalable to handle traffic spikes without degrading performance.

• Implement caching and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks): Caching reduces load on your origin server by serving static content quickly, while CDNs distribute content geographically closer to users and crawlers, reducing latency and server load.

• Optimize server hardware and network resources: Increase CPU, RAM, disk I/O speed, and network bandwidth to handle crawl requests efficiently, especially for large sites or SharePoint environments.

• Adopt HTTP/2 and Server Push: HTTP/2 multiplexes multiple requests over a single connection, reducing latency, and Server Push proactively sends critical resources to crawlers, improving crawl efficiency.

• Streamline site architecture: A flat, well-organized site structure with clear navigation and internal linking helps crawlers find important pages quickly without wasting crawl budget on low-value or duplicate pages.

• Manage crawl budget by blocking low-value pages: Use robots.txt and noindex tags to prevent crawling of irrelevant or duplicate content, allowing Googlebot to focus on high-priority pages.

• Schedule crawls during low server demand periods: This avoids overloading your server and ensures crawlers get faster responses.

Google recommends targeting a server response time under 200 milliseconds, ideally around 100 milliseconds Time To First Byte (TTFB), as anything above 500 milliseconds can hinder crawl rate.

By combining these hosting and server performance improvements, you can maximize crawl rate, reduce crawl delays, and accelerate the indexing of your website’s content.