The face of any business is its website. The internet users, when they come across your website and click on it, they want it to show up instantaneously. The expectation for any website is to load in no more than 2 seconds. Even a one second delay and you could just lose a prospective sales.

Be it first time visitors or even existing customers, if your website is taking ages to load or if your website is down, they will go to your competitor. It becomes extremely important to prevent website downtime at any cost to live upto your brand’s reputation. Also with SEO being given ample importance, the aim becomes to be noticed by Google Bot.


The Google Bot

It is basically an automated agent of the search engine that crawls around your site and looks for pages for it to be indexed. It acts more of a web surfer of the digital world. Imagine Google Bots crawling zillions of pages every second, every day, they will end up consuming valuable online bandwidth, when they visit your site – resulting in slow website performance.

The Googlebot maintains a crawl rate, which shows the number of requests per second google makes to a site when it’s crawling.
It is determined by the website performance. If there are faster loading pages, the crawl rate increases and vice versa. There are sophisticated algorithms that determine the speed for optimal crawl for a site.

There is a loophole to this. There are times when Googlebot makes umpteen requests per second to your site while indexing, this results in slowing down the server and in turn negatively affects  the website speed. But there is a way out of this gap.


Crawl Rate Limit

The main aim of Googlebot and its crawlers is to not degrade the user experience while visiting any site. To not let these bots affect your website speed, there is functionality where the google crawl rate can be monitored and optimized. This can be done using Google Search Console. Visit the crawl stats and analyze how the bots crawl your site. One can manually set the Google crawl rate and limit the speed as per the need. This will help you ease the issue without overwhelming the server bandwidth.

As Google does not index the admin pages or backend folders, the crawlers’ access to the same can be blocked by creating a Robot.txt file to stop the bots from crawling to those pages.

This is not only limited to desktop browsing. With the onset of Mobile First Indexing, the crawlers are giving more preference to sites that are mobile friendly and easily responsive while browsing through smartphones. Site owners will see a significantly increased crawl rate from the Smartphone Googlebot.

There is no such robust way to completely convert your website into a fortress and experience absolutely no downtime. With implementing such quick solutions, the google tools can be effectively optimized and also the website performance will remain unaffected.