Small sites rarely exhaust crawl budget, but new and low-authority domains experience its cousin: crawl reluctance. Google discovers URLs (via sitemaps and links) but declines to fetch them — surfacing in Search Console as 'Discovered – currently not indexed'. The cure is demand-side, not technical: fewer, deeper pages; internal links from pages Google already values; and external links that justify the crawl.
Wasting budget still hurts at any size: redirect chains, parameter duplicates, thin near-duplicate pages, and orphaned URLs all spend fetches that deeper pages needed.