Does The Time To Fetch & Render Indicate Possible Google Crawling Issues?

Andrew Shotland asked Google's John Mueller an interesting question around the fetch and render tool in the Google Search Console. He asked if the time it takes to fetch and render is longer than the norm, does that indicate an issue with the page it is trying to fetch? John Mueller of Google said it depends and hard to say just based on the how long it takes Google to return the page.

Obviously if Google returns with an error, that error will hopefully be specific enough where you can address the issue. But if it takes 30 seconds versus 3 minutes to fetch the page, that doesn't necessarily mean there is an issue with your page.

Here are the tweets with that conversation:

Lots of things. Submission-time alone isn't that relevant of a metric. /shrug :)

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) September 15, 2017

Yeah, sometimes it can be slow too. Sometimes we wait for a good time to crawl. Sometimes we wait for the server. ...

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) September 15, 2017

So if that Pending status is freaking you out, I wouldn't worry too much:

Forum discussion at Twitter.