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How Do I Get My WordPress Site Listed on Google? (Beginner’s Guide)

Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on WPBeginner. Commissions do not affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. Learn more about Editorial Process.

Are you looking to get your WordPress site listed on Google?

Being the largest search engine in the world, Google is quite good at automatically detecting and listing new websites. However, sometimes, it may not list your website right away.

Since Google is the biggest traffic source for most websites, it’s important that you get your website listed in Google immediately.

In this article, we will share how to easily get your WordPress site listed on Google.

Get your WordPress site listed on Google

Why Get Your Website Listed on Google?

Google is the top source of traffic and visitors for most websites. If you are serious about starting a blog or launching your small business website, then you need to get your website listed on Google as soon as possible.

If you are following the WordPress SEO best practices, then search engines like Google can automatically find your website. However, this could take some time, and you will miss out on potential customers.

But you can easily speed up this process. Let’s take a look at how to get your WordPress site listed on Google.

Before You Start

Before you start, you will need to create a Google Search Console account.

You can easily set it up by following our step-by-step instructions on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

Step 1: Checking WordPress Settings for Search Engine Visibility

After you have set up your Search Console account, you need to make sure that your WordPress site is visible to search engines.

You can check this by going to the Settings » Reading page and scrolling down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ option.

Search engine visibility

Make sure to remove the check mark from this option. This will allow search engines to crawl your website.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

Step 2: Connecting Google Search Console With WordPress

The next thing you need to do is add your website to Google Search Console.

We recommend using the URL prefix method because there are more ways to verify your site, and you don’t have to change your DNS records.

Add website URL

In the website field, you must add your full website URL. It is important to use exactly the same URL that you are seeing in your browser’s URL bar, including https and www or non-www.

Once you add the website URL, it will ask you to verify that you own the domain.

There are multiple methods that you can use to verify ownership. The easiest way is to click the arrow next to “Other verification methods”. This will give you a meta tag that you need to copy.

Copy meta tag

Next, you will need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin on your WordPress site. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will see a new item in your WordPress admin menu labeled All in One SEO.

Go ahead and click on the All in One SEO » General Settings menu, and then click the ‘Webmaster Tools’ tab at the top of the page.

AIOSEO webmaster tools menu

Next, you need to click on the ‘Google Search Console’ box.

Simply paste the verification code into the field that appears.

Google Search Console verification

Once you are done, make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the top of the screen.

Now, you can go back to the Google Search Console account and click on the ‘Verify’ button. Your website ownership will be successfully verified.

If, for some reason, it doesn’t verify, then you need to clear the cache in WordPress.

Step 3: Setting Up XML Sitemaps

Once your site is verified, you need to go to All in One SEO » General page in the WordPress admin area to verify your sitemap settings.

By default, AIOSEO creates the sitemaps you need automatically.

Enable sitemap in All in One SEO

To view your sitemaps, click the ‘Open Sitemap’ button.

Alternatively, you can add ‘sitemap.xml’ to your website’s URL, such as www.example.com/sitemap.xml.

All in One SEO XML sitemap preview

Next, you need to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Sitemaps help Google search bots easily find and index your new content.

Step 4: Submitting XML Sitemaps to Google Search Console

Simply log in to your Google Search Console account and select your website. After that, you will need to go to ‘Sitemaps’ on the left side of the screen.

Add sitemap to Google Search Console

Next, you should add the last part of your sitemap URL (‘sitemap.xml’) under the ‘Add a new sitemap’ section and click the ‘Submit’ button.

Once you are done with these steps, you can visit your Google Search Console account to check your listings. Once Google has crawled and indexed your website, you will start seeing reports in the search console.

After You Finish

An important factor that affects search rankings is website speed. Slower websites are bad for user experience and are often ranked lower than faster websites.

That’s why, once you get your website listed on Google, you should take a look at our guide on how to improve your website performance.

Expert Guides for Becoming More Visible on Google

Now that you know how to get your WordPress site listed on Google, you may like to see some other guides about how to become more visible on Google:

We hope this article helped you get your WordPress site listed on Google. You may also want to see our guide on how to make your WordPress website secure or our expert picks for the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools to optimize your website.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

35 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
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  2. Moinuddin Waheed says

    i was trying to add one of my websites to add to Google search console and I was struggling to change in the DNS records.
    it is good to see that we can add to Google search console even without changing the DNS records.
    Adding all in one seo made the verification of the ownership of domain and adding sitemap part so easy.

  3. Ankit says

    Hi Sir,

    I recently created my blog and I am not able to see it on website. Also, I am not able to open webpage through my isp it throws an error of “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN”. I tried fixing it to all the steps mentioned on google blogs. Not sure what to do.

  4. Funrich says

    Hello, so I just created a wordpress site and I have done all the guidese you mentioned above, but when I typed on Google, I still cannot find my website

    • WPBeginner Support says

      If you just created your WordPress site, you need to give time for search engines to crawl your content as you cannot be listed before you have content to list unless you’re searching specifically for your site’s URL.

      Admin

  5. Michael Hodgson says

    You lost me at “Next, on your WordPress site you’ll need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin.” My web site is on-line. Installing anything doesn’t mean anything.

  6. Trip says

    Hello , Great article. I did all these steps, and 8,9 days later I still don’t see my website in search. Is it possible that Google still didn’t index my website?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      We do not have a specific timeframe that Google would crawl your site but you can search for your site using site:yoursite to see if your site is in search.

      Admin

    • WPBeginner Support says

      You may want to try resaving your permalinks for the most common solution to that error.

      Admin

  7. Dave G says

    Great article, the steps are easy to follow even where the current Google settings pages don’t quite match the description. Thanks !

    • WPBeginner Support says

      You’re welcome, we try to keep the article up to date but Google does not always make it easy :)

      Admin

  8. franco says

    Hi, sorry, i don’t really get a couple of things.
    I have a free-plan blog i use just to fool around and discover ho WP works.
    The layout of the settings is different than described in this article and the blog is open by almost a month. Shoudn’t i be able to see it, already, in search engines results?
    Being it a free-plan, i can’t install plugins, so no webaster tools for me yet.
    So, how does it work? should i simply wait a bit more for the clawler to do its magic, or a free-plan simply is not predisposed to be SEO-compatible (in order to push for at least a basic-plan)?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      It could either be how valuable Google sees your content or Google could have not crawled your site yet, you would want to check with WordPress.com’s support for the limitations and recommendations for their free sites.

      Admin

  9. Lisa Meyers says

    We love your site and your the best place for information for beginners, especially the easy to follow videos you make. We have the opposite need we want to use a premade template, but we need people to have access to the site to view when needed to give us help on how it’s going. But we’re worried if google sees the site and all the pages it will hurt the site because of all the dummy content, until we replace it with our own. The site has been up for a while with the plain homepage from the initial install and has been indexed already as it is, with nothing on it so far. Thanks again for the excellent site and all the work you put into it to help others.

  10. Luis Arango says

    Thank you very much for the article, it has been very helpful to understand the importance of indexing our web pages in the Google search engine and how to run it.

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