How to Submit Your WordPress Site to Search Engines

After years of setting up new WordPress sites, the question I hear most from beginners is some version of this: “Why isn’t my website showing up on Google?”

In most cases, nothing is wrong. Search engines simply haven’t discovered or indexed your website yet.

The good news is that you can speed that up by submitting your WordPress site directly to Google, Bing, and other search engines. In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to do that, step by step.

Use the quick links below to jump straight to the section you need:

Before You Submit: Make Sure WordPress Isn’t Blocking Search Engines

Before doing anything else, you need to make sure WordPress isn’t accidentally hiding your website from search engines.

In your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Settings » Reading and scroll down to the ‘Search engine visibility’ section. Then, make sure that the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ box is unchecked and click ‘Save Changes’.

If that box was already unchecked, then check these common blockers:

• A site cloned from a staging site that brought a noindex setting with it
• A leftover Disallow: / rule in your robots.txt file from development, which blocks your entire site
• A noindex setting on the individual page or post in your SEO plugin.

Once you’ve ruled all of those out, you’re ready to submit your site. But there’s one thing to grab first: your sitemap. Because it’s what you’ll actually be submitting to search engines.

Find Your WordPress XML Sitemap

When non-techy beginners hear “submit your website to search engines,” it often confuses them because they think they’ll submit the homepage URL. You actually have to submit your XML sitemap.

An XML sitemap is a list of all the content on your WordPress website, including your posts and pages. It helps search engine bots discover your content faster. Think of it as a map you give to search engines so they don’t have to guess what’s on your site or discover every page by following backlinks.

Both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will ask for your sitemap address during setup, so let’s get it ready.

To find your sitemap URL, simply visit the default WordPress sitemap URL: example.com/wp-sitemap.xml. If you haven’t generated a sitemap with an SEO plugin, then the above URL will be your sitemap URL. Make sure to replace example.com with your domain name.

But if you’ve generated a sitemap with an SEO plugin, then you’ll be redirected to a different URL when you visit the above URL. It will look something likeexample.com/sitemap.xml (if you use All in One SEO [AIOSEO]) or example.com/sitemap_index.xml (if you use Yoast SEO or Rank Math).

Now that you can see your sitemap, keep this tab open because you’ll need to grab the sitemap URL from your browser address bar and copy it into Google Search Console in the next steps.

Note: The default WordPress sitemap works fine, but using an SEO plugin to generate the sitemap gives you control over which pages, posts, or categories to excluded from it.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a sitemap in WordPress.

How to Submit Your Website to Google Search Console

To submit your website to Google, you need to sign up for Google Search Console. It’s a free tool that helps website owners see how their website is performing in Google search results.

Simply go to the Google Search Console website and click on the ‘Start now’ button. You can sign in using your existing Google account, or create a new account.

Next, Google will prompt you to enter your site’s domain name. We recommend using the ‘URL prefix’ option since it’s easier to verify.

Just be sure to enter your exact website address exactly as it appears in your browser, including https:// and www if you use them.

Google will show you a few different ways to prove that you own the site.

For most WordPress users, the ‘HTML tag’ method is the simplest, so click to expand it. Then, click the ‘Copy’ button to grab your verification code.

Now switch back to your WordPress dashboard to add that code. The exact steps depend on which SEO plugin you use, so we’ll walk through each option below.

Verify Your Website with Google Search Console

If you’re using the free version of All in One SEO, then you can add the verification code inside the plugin.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to All in One SEO » General Settings » Webmaster Tools.

On this screen, select ‘Google Search Console’.

Google’s ‘Copy’ button gives you the whole HTML tag, but this field only wants the code inside it. So paste in just the long string of letters and numbers that sits between the quote marks after content=, and then click ‘Save Changes.’

Next, return to your Google Search Console tab and click the ‘Verify’ button to finish.

If you’re using the premium version of AIOSEO, you can skip the manual copy-and-paste steps altogether.

Simply head over to All in One SEO » General Settings in your WordPress dashboard, and click on the Webmaster Tools tab, just like before.

However, this time select ‘Google Search Console’ and then click the ‘Connect to Google Search Console’ button.

AIOSEO then completes the connection for you.

Yoast SEO and Rank Math have the same kind of field if you use one of those instead:

• In Yoast, it is under Yoast SEO » Settings » Site connections.
• In Rank Math, it is under Rank Math SEO » General Settings » Webmaster Tools.

If you aren’t using an SEO plugin at all, then you can also easily add the code using the free WPCode plugin instead.

Simply go to Code Snippets » Header & Footer in your dashboard.

Then, paste your verification tag into the Header box. Unlike the All in One SEO field above, this one takes the whole HTML tag.

After saving your changes, head back over to Google Search Console and click the ‘Verify’ button to finish setting it up.

Adding Your XML Sitemap to Google Search Console

With your site verified, it’s time to submit that sitemap address you found earlier.

Simply log in to your Google Search Console account, and then click on the ‘Sitemaps’ link in the left-hand toolbar.

You’ll notice that Google Search Console has already pre-filled your website domain in the box.

Type the rest of your sitemap address from step 1 of this guide into the box.

Then, click the ‘Submit’ button.

You should see a confirmation message, and your sitemap will appear in the ‘Submitted sitemaps’ list.

How to Submit an Individual Page to Google

You can also submit an individual page to Google. This can be helpful if you just published a new post and want Google to find it faster.

You can ask Google to check a specific page using the ‘URL Inspection’ tool in Google Search Console. Paste the exact URL of your new blog post into the search bar and hit ‘Enter’ or ‘Return’ on your keyboard.

Google will check the link and show you a gray message stating ‘URL is not on Google.’ If it’s not indexed yet, simply click the ‘Request Indexing’ button.

This asks Google to crawl the page sooner. There is a daily limit on how many URLs you can submit this way, and sending the same URL again will not get it crawled any faster.

Keep in mind that a request does not guarantee the page gets included, or that it happens right away.

How to Submit Your Website to Bing (Plus Yahoo and DuckDuckGo)

Google holds over 90% of the search market, but other search engines like Bing can still be a significant source of traffic for your website. Beyond its own search page, Bing powers answers in Microsoft Copilot and supplies search results to DuckDuckGo and Yahoo.

Plus, Bing supports the IndexNow protocol, which you can switch on afterwards so that Bing hears about your new and updated pages the moment you publish them.

To submit URLs to the Bing index, you need to sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools.

Just click the ‘Sign In’ button to get started. Then, sign in using your Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account.

Since you’ve already verified your site with Google Search Console, you can just import it directly into Bing. On the Bing Webmaster Tools setup screen, click ‘Import’.

On the next screen, click ‘Continue,’ then log in with the same Google account you used for Search Console.

Next, select your website from the list and hit ‘Import’. Bing will copy over your site verification and existing sitemaps for you.

If you would rather add your site manually instead of importing it from Google, then see our guide on how to add your website to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Submit Your Sitemap to Bing

If you imported your site from Google, then Bing already has your sitemap and you can skip ahead to IndexNow below.

If you added your site manually, then click the ‘Sitemaps’ tab on the left sidebar and click the ‘Submit sitemap’ button.

You need to paste in the URL of your sitemap index, which is the address you noted earlier.

After that, just click the ‘Submit’ button.

Turn on IndexNow (Optional)

The last step is optional. Switching on IndexNow tells Bing about your new pages right away, instead of leaving them to wait for the next crawl.

To switch IndexNow on, install and activate the free IndexNow plugin, which is built and maintained by the Bing Webmaster Tools team. If you’re using a WordPress SEO plugin like AIOSEO, Yoast, etc, they have built-in this feature, so you don’t need a separate plugin.

This functionality automatically submits your new and updated URLs as soon as you publish them. Deleted pages count as changes too, so a page you remove drops out of results faster than waiting for the next crawl.

There is one limit to know before you rely on this: Google is not an IndexNow participant. The search engines that currently accept IndexNow submissions include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yep, Internet Archive, and Amazon.

And a submission is not a promise of indexing. IndexNow tells these search engines that a URL has changed so they can prioritize crawling it, but each one still decides whether and when to index it.

How to Check If Your Website Is Indexed

Your website is submitted to both search engines now, so the last thing to do is confirm it actually worked.

Indexing isn’t instant. It can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks for search engines to crawl and index a new website.

The easiest way to check if your website is indexed is to go to your preferred search engine and search for site:yoursitename.com. Just be sure to leave out https:// and www, and don’t put a space after the colon.

For the WPBeginner website, we would type site:wpbeginner.com into the search engine.

If your site has been indexed, then you should see a list of your content, usually including your homepage.

This works for all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.

For a clearer picture, check the Pages report under the ‘Indexing’ tab in Google Search Console.

This shows you exactly which URLs are indexed and explains why any pages were skipped, with reasons like “URL marked ‘noindex'” or “Discovered – currently not indexed.”

This helps you quickly figure out whether there’s an actual error to fix or if Google simply needs more time.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How long will it take for my site to appear in search engines?

Anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks, and the final decision is up to the search engines. Requesting indexing in Google Search Console and getting plenty of backlinks to your site can also help speed up the process.

2. Why isn’t my site showing up in search engines?

Most often it’s the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ box in Settings » Reading, which makes WordPress add a noindex tag to every page. See Before You Submit above to check and fix it.

After fixing this, Google still has to recrawl your pages before it notices the tag is gone. To speed that up, request indexing for your homepage using the ‘URL Inspection’ tool in Google Search Console.

3. Is there a submission site list I can use?

You don’t need to worry about submitting to lots of search engines. The most important one is Google, followed by Bing.

The other search engines you should consider submitting to are local ones. For instance, you could submit your website to Yandex if you want to get more visitors from Russia.

4. Google Search Console says my page is ‘Discovered – currently not indexed.’ What does this mean?

It means Google knows your page exists but hasn’t crawled it yet. Google’s documentation says this usually happens because crawling right then was expected to overload your server, so Google rescheduled it. It does not mean your site is penalized.

Google will come back to it on its own. Adding internal links from your existing pages to the new post can help it get there sooner.

5. Should I use a website submission service?

No. They charge a premium fee for something you can do yourself in a few minutes, and some of them submit your site to spammy sources, which can harm your website’s SEO.

We hope this article helped you learn how to submit your website to search engines. You may also want to see our guides on ultimate WordPress SEO guide or our pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins.

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