Blog · October 1, 2026 · 1 min
How long does a site check take?
About forty seconds from paste to a readable report, and the first sections arrive in under five. Here is where the time goes and what makes it longer.
The short answer is forty seconds for a typical site, and you are reading the first sections before ten of them have passed. The long answer is that "a check" is a dozen separate lookups that finish at different speeds, and the page shows each one as it lands rather than waiting for the slowest.
What happens in the first five seconds
The fast sources answer almost instantly: the pages the site itself serves, the headers it sends, and anything already in the cache from a previous check of the same site. Those sections render first.
What takes the rest
Third-party archives are slower, and some ask for politeness. One of them wants no more than a request every few seconds across everyone, so a busy minute means a short queue. The report says "still gathering" for that section instead of pretending it is empty.
What makes it longer
- A site that is slow itself. We wait as long as a browser would.
- A first-ever check. The second check of the same site is mostly cache.
- A very large site. Only the first few hundred pages are sampled.
A note on the numbers above
The forty-second figure is a median across last month's checks, not a promise. The slowest tenth took over two minutes, almost all of them because the site being checked was slow.