How to get your new website on Google, step by step

To get a new website on Google, first make sure your platform isn’t hiding it from search engines, then verify the site in Google Search Console, submit its sitemap and ask Google to crawl the homepage. If customers come to you, or you go to them, set up a Google Business Profile as well. Then give it time: Google says crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and it promises no date and no position. Nobody can pay to skip the queue, either: Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher. Here are the steps in the order to do them in launch week.

Check the site isn’t hidden from search engines

Every platform has a setting that keeps an unfinished site out of search, and plenty of sites launch with it still on. Check yours first, because none of the later steps work until it’s off.

Platform	The setting that hides the site	Where to change it	Sitemap address
Squarespace	Private or Password Protected; “Block Search engine crawlers” ticked	The Site Availability panel; Settings > Crawlers	/sitemap.xml
Wix	“Let search engines index your site” switched off	SEO & GEO > Tools and settings > SEO Settings	/sitemap.xml
Shopify	The password page (the store is Private)	Online Store: click Private, choose Public	/sitemap.xml
WordPress.com	Coming Soon or Private	Settings > Reading > Site Visibility	/sitemap.xml
WordPress (self-hosted)	“Discourage search engines from indexing this site” ticked	Settings > Reading	/wp-sitemap.xml

Two details trip people up. On Squarespace, a site needs a paid plan before it can be made public, and even a public site stays out of search while the Crawlers setting blocks search engines. On self-hosted WordPress, the “discourage” box also switches off the built-in sitemap, and an SEO plugin may replace that sitemap with its own: Yoast SEO’s is at /sitemap_index.xml.

The builders handle the technical side for you (the sitemap, a secure https address, the code search engines read), which is one reason first-timers start on one; Squarespace vs Wix compares the two. The two kinds of WordPress hide a site with different settings on the same Reading screen, one of the smaller differences in WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.

Verify the site in Google Search Console

Search Console is Google’s free set of reports on your site: which pages are in Google, which searches show them, and what’s broken. Verifying proves to Google that the site is yours. There are two kinds of property to add:

• A Domain property covers every version of the address: with and without www, http and https. It can only be verified with a DNS record, a line of text you add where your domain is managed.
• A URL-prefix property covers one exact address, such as https://www.yourbusiness.com. It can be verified with an HTML tag on your homepage, an HTML file, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager.

Choose the Domain property if you can reach your domain’s settings. Then:

1. Open Search Console and sign in with a Google account the business will keep, not one that leaves with a staff member.
2. Add a property, choose Domain and type your domain without www or https, such as yourbusiness.com.
3. Copy the TXT record Search Console gives you.
4. Add it as a new TXT record in your domain’s DNS settings, at your registrar or in your builder’s domain panel if the domain came with the plan.
5. Back in Search Console, click Verify. If it fails, the record may not have spread yet; wait a few hours and try again.

Google’s help page on verifying your site ownership suggests checking your platform’s own instructions first, since some builders connect Search Console from their dashboards. On WordPress, Site Kit is the only plugin Google itself sponsors for this.

Submit your sitemap

A sitemap is a file listing the pages on your site. All five platforms in the table make one for you and keep it up to date. To hand it to Google:

1. In Search Console, open Sitemaps under Indexing.
2. Type the sitemap’s address after your domain: sitemap.xml on Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and WordPress.com, wp-sitemap.xml on WordPress without an SEO plugin, or the plugin’s own address if you use one (sitemap_index.xml for Yoast SEO).
3. Click Submit, and check that the status reads Success.

Google calls a sitemap “merely a hint”, and says a site of about 500 pages or fewer may not need one at all. Submit it anyway: it takes two minutes, and the report then shows when Google last read it and whether anything went wrong.

Ask Google to look at your homepage

Use the URL Inspection tool for the pages that matter most:

1. Paste your homepage’s address into the search bar at the top of Search Console.
2. If it says “URL is not on Google”, click Test live URL to check that Google can reach the page and is allowed to index it.
3. Click Request indexing.

Do the same for your main service or product pages, and leave the rest to the sitemap. There’s a daily limit on requests, and Google’s guide to asking Google to recrawl is clear that asking twice won’t speed things up, and that a request doesn’t guarantee the page gets in.

Set up a Google Business Profile if you serve a local area

A Business Profile is the free listing that shows your business on Google Search and Maps, with your hours, photos and reviews. It can appear when people search for your name, or for your trade nearby, before they ever reach your website. Google’s guidelines for representing your business set who can have one:

• Eligible: a business with a place customers can visit, or one that travels to customers where they are.
• Service-area businesses, such as a plumber or a mobile dog groomer, should hide their address and set the area they serve instead.
• Not eligible: a virtual office or rented mailing address where the business doesn’t operate, or a PO box.

If you never meet customers in person, the profile isn’t for you. If you do, create it, add your website’s address, and verify it. Google picks the verification method for each business: a video recording, a phone call or text, an email, a live video call or a postcard. Reviews can take up to five business days.

Give each service its own page

Google’s Search Essentials advise using the words people would use to look for your content, and putting them where they stand out, such as the page title and the main heading. A one-page site has one title and one main heading for everything you do. A page for each main service, named the way customers say it (“Kitchen remodeling in Columbus”, not “Our solutions”), gives Google a page to match to that search and gives the person searching a page that answers it.

Theme Match makes the same point about the quickest site to finish, a one-page Wix template for consultants: add a page per service if you want people searching for that service to land on you. Each new page joins the sitemap on its own; request indexing for it as you did for the homepage.

How long it takes, and how to check

Google’s own figure for crawling is “anywhere from a few days to a few weeks”, and its SEO Starter Guide adds that some changes take effect in hours while others take months. Here is a sensible rhythm for the first month:

1. Launch day: turn off the hiding setting, verify, submit the sitemap and request indexing for the homepage.
2. After a few days: search Google for site:yourbusiness.com, with your own domain. As Google’s SEO Starter Guide puts it, “If you see results pointing to your site, you’re in the index.” URL Inspection on the homepage should now say “URL is on Google”.
3. After two or three weeks: open the Pages report under Indexing to see which pages are indexed and why any aren’t. Once the site shows up in results, the Performance report lists the searches it appeared for.

“URL is on Google” means the page can appear in results, not that it ranks for a given search. Getting in comes first; showing up for the searches you want takes longer.

If your site still isn’t on Google

If a site: search still shows nothing after a few weeks, work down this list:

• A hiding setting is back on, or there’s one on a single page. Squarespace has a “Hide page from search results” toggle in each page’s SEO settings, and Wix has a per-page indexing switch in its SEO panel. URL Inspection reports a page “excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” when one of these is on.
• The plan has lapsed. A Squarespace site needs a paid plan to be public, so a trial that has ended or a plan that has expired takes it off the web, and out of search with it.
• The sitemap shows an error. Check that you typed the address exactly as your platform gives it, then submit it again.
• Pages are “Discovered” or “Crawled” but “currently not indexed”. Google has found them and not added them yet. Make sure each page has a clear purpose and real content, and that people can find the site from elsewhere: your Business Profile, your social profiles, the directories your trade belongs to.
• The domain changed after you verified. Add and verify the new domain as its own property, and submit its sitemap.

Google doesn’t promise to index every page, even on a site that does everything right, so a page or two left out of a small site isn’t a fault. If the homepage itself is missing after a month, go back to the first table: it’s almost always a setting. Search Console, Google Business Profile and the free tools worth adding later are on the Tools page, and the next steps, from analytics to local search, are in SEO & Growth.