Most checks finish in seconds. When one cannot, the report says why. Here is what each message means and what to do next.
Error Messages
- "We could not find that website" - the address does not exist. Check the spelling, and whether the site uses www
- "The website took too long to respond" - we wait up to 8 seconds for each request. Try again in a minute; if it keeps happening, the site may be slow for search engine crawlers too
- "The website's security certificate could not be verified" - the HTTPS certificate is missing, expired or for another address
- "The address redirects too many times for us to follow" - the page redirects in a loop or through a long chain of redirects
- "That page does not exist (HTTP 404)" - the page is missing. Check the address, or try your homepage
- "That address is not a web page" - it points at a file such as a PDF or an image. Enter the address of a page instead
- "We cannot scan that address" - it points at a private or restricted network address, which we never fetch
- "You have run a lot of scans in the last hour" - you have reached the hourly limit; the message says how long to wait
Click "Try again" on a failed report to run the check again with the address filled in.
The Site Blocks Our Crawler
If the site answers our crawler with "forbidden", "too many requests" or a similar refusal, you still get a report. The "Page reachable by crawlers" check fails and the checks that need the page's content are marked Not checked. Bot-protection and firewall services sometimes refuse crawlers in the same way. Most let verified search engines such as Googlebot and Bingbot through, but check their settings, and the crawl reports in Google Search Console, if pages are missing from search results.
A Score That Looks Too Low
- "Readable without JavaScript" fails - the HTML your server sends has almost no text, because the page is built in the browser. Google renders JavaScript in a later step and not every search engine does, so render the main content on the server
- Googlebot or Bingbot is blocked - check robots.txt for an old rule such as "User-agent: * Disallow: /", often left over from a staging site, or a group naming one of them
- A noindex - check for a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header set on the page, and for a "discourage search engines" setting in your website builder
- No XML sitemap - see the sitemap guide
Still Stuck?
Open a support ticket with the report's link and we will take a look.