---
title: "Understand crawler schedules"
slug: "understand-crawler-schedules"
abstract: "Information about what scheduling a crawl for a Sitecore Search source means, along with best practices."
---
# Understand crawler schedules

You can [create a crawler schedule](https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/users/search-user-guide/index-items/keep-indexes-up-to-date/configure-a-crawler-schedule.html "Configure a crawler schedule") to enable Search to connect to your original content at defined intervals automatically. This ensures your index documents are always updated with the latest version of your content, removing the need for you to do frequent [manual recrawls.](https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/users/search-user-guide/index-items/keep-indexes-up-to-date/manually-trigger-a-recrawl-or-reindex.html "Manually trigger a recrawl or reindex")

You can create one crawler schedule per source. You can also [manually kick off a crawl](https://doc.sitecore.com/search/en/users/search-user-guide/index-items/keep-indexes-up-to-date/manually-trigger-a-recrawl-or-reindex.html "Manually trigger a recrawl or reindex") at any time.

> [!note]
> When you schedule a crawl to start at a specific time, Search tries to run the crawl at that time but might face delays because of resource availability. As a result, the crawl can start a little later than the scheduled time.
>
> For example, assume you schedule a crawl to run every day at `11:30`. If resources are available, the crawl starts at `11:30`. However, if resources are not immediately available, the crawl might start at `11:40` or `11:50`.

![Shows the Crawler schedule window, with scheduling parameters.](https://doc.sitecore.com/api/markdown-image/search/en/users/search-user-guide/images/crawler_schedule.png)

## Best practices for scheduling crawls

We recommend the following best practices when you schedule crawls for sources:

- If you have many sources, we recommend that you stagger scheduled crawls to make the best use of resources. For example, you can schedule source *A* to start at `11:00`, source *B* to start at `11:30`, and source *C* to start at `12:00`.
- If you know that the server hosting your original content experiences high traffic during certain hours, schedule crawls outside of these hours.
- To optimize performance, schedule recrawls based on how often your content changes. For most sources, we recommend daily or less frequent scans.