How long does a scan take to complete? | Web Governance | Acquia Product Documentation
How long does a scan take to complete?
Date Published: February 10, 2021
When Web Governance does a scan on your domains, there are several factors that affect 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. Because 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 that have an impact on scan time.
Factors that affect scan time
Number of pages: The more pages a domain contains, the longer it takes to complete the scan.
Number of links:Web Governance checks every link we find on every page that is included in the scan parameters. A page with 100 links will therefore take longer for the scan to complete than a page with 5 links. To speed up a scan, you may want to apply link exclusions if you know there are certain links you don’t need Web Governance to scan. For more information and instructions on how to set them up, see the user guide article: Path Constraints and Link Exclusions.
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 Web Governance to run our checks on all the content, thereby increasing the overall scan time.
Response time from the server: When Web Governance is doing a scan on a page, we make requests to the website server in order to get the page content. If the server responds slowly, the scan takes longer. There may also be cases where the Web Governance crawler gets temporarily rate-limited by a server because we make many requests within a short amount of time. Web Governance users can adjust scan speed settings but be aware that this may incur rate limiting. For more information and instructions on how to adjust the scan speed settings, see the user guide article: Configure Domain Scans.
Scans in queue:Web Governance scans thousands of domains concurrently at any given time during a day. Requested 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 Web Governance configuration, you have access to a variety of different modules. As a rule of thumb, the more modules that are enabled on a domain, the more checks that Web Governance is running. As a consequence, it takes longer for the scan to complete each 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 that it finds on every page.
See the scan progress on the Domain Dashboard in Web Governance. Click on it to see the current status of the scan, including which link the scan is currently on:
Web Governance