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How long does a scan take to complete?
How long does a scan take to complete?

A guide to understanding the variables affecting scan time

Updated over a week ago

When Monsido scans your domains, there are several factors affecting how long the scan takes to complete. Some of these factors depend on user configuration while others are determined by external variables, such as server response time. As every website and hosting environment is different, it is impossible to estimate exactly how long a scan will take. Below you can read more about the various factors impacting scan time.

Factors affecting scan time

  • Amount of pages: The more pages a domain contains, the longer it takes to scan.

  • Amount of links: Monsido checks every link we find on every scanned page. A page with 100 links will therefore take longer to scan than a page with 5 links. To speed up a scan, you may want to apply Link Excludes if you know there are certain links you don’t need Monsido to scan.

  • Size of pages (HTML): The amount of HTML content on pages may vary significantly. The more content a page contains, the longer it will take Monsido to run our checks on all the content, thereby increasing overall scan time.

  • Response time from server: When Monsido is scanning a page, we make requests to the website server in order to get page content. If the server responds slowly, the scan takes longer. There may also be cases where the Monsido crawler gets temporarily rate limited by a server because we make a lot of requests within a short amount of time. Monsido users can adjust scan speed settings but be aware that this may incur rate limiting.

  • Scans in queue: Monsido scans thousands of domains concurrently at any given time during a day. Scans enter a queuing system and begin when a crawler is available to commence the scan. Queue times vary and may occasionally be slightly longer than what can normally be expected which means the total scan time increases.

  • Features enabled on a domain: Depending on your specific Monsido configuration, you have access to a variety of different modules. As a rule of thumb, the more modules enabled on a domain, the more checks Monsido is running. As a consequence, it takes longer to scan a page. Here are some examples of modules that prolong scan time, if enabled:

    • Consent Manager: Adds a scan for cookies on every page.

    • Data Privacy: Adds Data Privacy checks on every page.

    • Accessibility: Adds hundreds of Accessibility checks on every page.

    • Quality Assurance - Spellcheck: Adds a spellcheck of text paragraphs found on every page.

    • Quality Assurance - Broken links: Adds checks of links and images found on every page.

For more information about how Monsido scans work, see How Monsido Scans Links on your Website.

How to check the current status of a scan

See the scan progress on the Domain Dashboard in Monsido. Click on it to see the current status of the scan, including which link the scan is currently on:

Domain Dashboard

Screenshot showing crawl history, the number of pages last scanned, and the status of an ongoing scan on the Domain Dashboard..

Crawl Status window

A screenshot of the crawl status window showing the progress of the scan and the URL being scanned.

Contact the Monsido support team at support@monsido.com or via the Monsido chat and help features inside the application.

Image of the dashboard showing the locations of the Help Center buttons.
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