WordPress Site Not Showing in Google: Indexing Diagnosis
Not indexed and not ranking are different problems. Check whether Google has the page at all, then whether it is allowed to index it, then whether it deserves a position.
First test: search site:example.com and inspect one specific URL in Search Console. If nothing at all appears, the site is not indexed and something is blocking it. If pages appear but never rank for anything, indexing is fine and the problem is competitiveness.
Those two situations have nothing in common, so establish which one you have before changing anything.
Case 1: nothing is indexed
Work through these in order — the first is the cause more often than everything else combined.
The discourage setting is on. Check Settings → Reading for Discourage search engines from indexing this site. Sites launched from staging routinely go live with it enabled. Untick it, then request indexing.
robots.txt blocks crawling. Open https://example.com/robots.txt. A Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks everything. WordPress generates this file virtually unless a real file exists in the web root, in which case the real file wins and needs editing.
The site is behind authentication. Password protection, a maintenance-mode plugin or an IP allowlist keeps crawlers out as effectively as visitors.
The site is brand new. With no inbound links and no submitted sitemap, discovery takes time. Verify in Search Console, submit the sitemap, and request indexing for the homepage and a handful of key pages.
The site is unreachable when Googlebot visits. Intermittent 5xx errors or aggressive rate limiting cause crawling to back off. Check the Crawl Stats report and the server error log — site not loading covers the underlying causes.
Case 2: some pages are indexed, others are not
Open Search Console's Pages report and read the exclusion reason for the missing URLs.
| Reason given | What it means |
|---|---|
| Excluded by "noindex" tag | The page tells Google not to index it |
| Blocked by robots.txt | Crawling is disallowed, so indexing cannot happen |
| Alternative page with canonical | Google chose another URL as canonical |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical | Google disagreed with your canonical |
| Crawled, currently not indexed | Discovered but judged not worth indexing yet |
| Discovered, currently not indexed | Known but not yet crawled — usually crawl budget or quality |
| Soft 404 | Thin or empty content returning a 200 status |
Noindex tags come from three places: the SEO plugin's per-post setting, its site-wide defaults for archives and taxonomies, or a leftover theme setting. Inspect the page source for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> and trace which plugin printed it.
Canonical problems happen when several URLs serve the same content — with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters, or paginated archives. Pick one canonical form, make internal links use it, and let redirects handle the rest.
"Crawled, currently not indexed" is usually a quality signal rather than a technical fault. Thin category pages, tag archives with one post, and near-duplicate product variations all attract it. The fix is fewer, better pages — merge or noindex the thin ones.
Case 3: indexed but not ranking
The page can be found by searching an exact sentence from it, but nothing else brings it up.
- Check the query intent. A page written as a product listing rarely ranks for a how-to question, and vice versa.
- Check competition. For established commercial terms, a new site rarely places quickly regardless of on-page work.
- Check the impressions data. Search Console's Performance report shows what the page already appears for. Improving a query at position 12 is far easier than inventing a new one.
- Check internal links. A page nothing links to reads as unimportant.
- Check the title and description. Appearing at position 8 with a vague title produces almost no clicks, which does not help.
After a migration or redesign
Sudden disappearance following a launch usually has a mechanical cause:
- The discourage setting came across from staging.
- The permalink structure changed and old URLs 404 — see how to fix WordPress 404 errors.
- Redirects were built as chains instead of one hop each.
- The canonical hostname changed and the old one was not redirected.
- The sitemap still lists old URLs.
Check all five before concluding anything about content. The migration order that avoids most of it is in how to migrate a WordPress site.
Speed up discovery
- Submit an accurate XML sitemap listing only canonical, indexable URLs.
- Link to new content from pages that are already indexed.
- Keep the site fast enough to crawl efficiently, per how to speed up a WordPress site.
- Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for genuinely important pages — sparingly, since it is not a bulk tool.
Verify
A week after the fix, inspect the same URL again in Search Console. You want "URL is on Google", a recent crawl date, and the canonical Google selected matching the one you declared. If all three are right and the page still gets no impressions, the remaining work is content and links, not configuration — the groundwork is in the WordPress SEO checklist.
Frequently asked
- Often days, sometimes weeks. New sites with few links get crawled less frequently, so submitting the sitemap and requesting indexing for key pages speeds things up.
- Crawled means Google fetched the page. Indexed means it was stored and can appear in results. A page can be crawled repeatedly and still not be indexed.
- It is a rough indicator, not authoritative. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console gives the real status for a specific URL.