How to get your website on Google, and why it might not show.

Getting your website on Google is free and mostly automatic: Google discovers sites by following links and reading sitemaps, and a healthy new site usually appears in its index within days to a few weeks. If yours has not appeared, or has vanished, there are only about six causes, and every one of them can be diagnosed from your own chair in ten minutes. We re-indexed 34 pages of our own site this summer and watched the whole machine work from the inside, so this guide covers both halves honestly: how to get on Google, and what to check when you are not.

First, find out whether you are actually missing

Before fixing anything, measure the problem. Type site:yourwebsite.co.uk into Google, with your own address after the colon. That search shows every page of your site Google currently holds. If pages appear, your site is on Google, and your real issue is ranking, which is a different problem covered below. If nothing appears at all, you have an indexing problem, and the rest of this guide is for you.

The proper tool for this is Google Search Console, which is free, official, and shows exactly how Google sees each page. Verifying your site there takes a few minutes with a DNS record or an HTML file, and it is the single most useful thing a website owner can set up, because every diagnosis below gets easier with it.

The six reasons a website does not show up

The cause	How to spot it	The fix
Too new, not crawled yet	Site launched days ago, site: shows nothing	Submit the sitemap, request indexing, wait
Google was told not to index it	"noindex" tag or blocked robots.txt	Remove the block, request indexing
Discovered but not yet indexed	Search Console says "Discovered · currently not indexed"	Improve the page, earn links, request indexing
Thin or duplicated content	Pages indexed then quietly dropped	Rewrite pages so each says something real
Indexed but ranking nowhere	site: shows pages, searches never do	This is SEO, not indexing: see below
Technical faults	Slow loads, broken pages, server errors	Fix the foundation the crawler gave up on

The "noindex" one deserves a special mention because it is the classic self-inflicted wound: site builders and WordPress both have a single innocent-looking tick box ("discourage search engines from indexing this site") that developers set during the build and forget to unset at launch. Whole businesses have been invisible for months over one checkbox, so check it first.

If the diagnosis keeps pointing at the site itself, slow, templated, thin, that is the point where patching stops paying and our web design service becomes the honest answer: custom-coded builds that launch with the sitemap, structure and technical signals Google needs already in place, from £675 +VAT.

Indexed and ranking are different problems

The most common confusion we untangle on first calls: "my website is not on Google" usually means "my website does not come up when I search for plumber Swansea", and those are different failures. Indexing is binary: Google either holds your pages or it does not, and the site: search settles it. Ranking is competitive: your indexed page is in the contest but losing it, usually to businesses with faster sites, more complete content, stronger reviews and an active Google Business Profile. If your pages are indexed but invisible for the searches that matter, you have graduated from this guide to local SEO, and our guide to what SEO costs in the UK explains what fixing that is worth paying for, and what it is not.

One more distinction worth naming: searching your exact business name and searching your trade are different contests too. A healthy site should win its own name within weeks. Winning "electrician Bridgend" is the long game.

Getting a new website on Google, step by step

For a brand-new site the happy path is short. Verify the site in Search Console. Submit your sitemap, the machine-readable list of your pages, which any properly built site generates automatically. Request indexing for your most important pages through the URL Inspection tool at the top of Search Console: paste the address, wait for the check, press the button. Then give Google reasons to care: a complete Google Business Profile linking to the site, your social profiles pointing at it, and any local directories or trade bodies that list you. Links are how Google weighs importance, and a site nothing links to is a rumour.

Then wait, and this is the part nobody enjoys: indexing takes days, ranking takes weeks to months, and no legitimate provider can shortcut either. Anyone promising "on Google in 24 hours" is selling you the free button above.

What we learned re-indexing our own site

This summer we relaunched our own website and then did exactly what this guide describes, at scale, in public view of our own Search Console. Thirty-four of our pages were sitting unindexed after the relaunch, mostly stale snapshots of the old site. We fixed the content, mapped over 300 old addresses to new ones, and requested indexing page by page over several days, rationed by Google's quota of roughly a dozen requests a day.

The results were fast enough to surprise us: requested pages were re-crawled within hours, and our indexed page count climbed from around 90 to 108 within days, with the new pages appearing for their target searches the same week. Two lessons transfer to any business. First, the request-indexing button genuinely works when the underlying page deserves it; it is a queue-jump, not a bribe. Second, Google moves at the speed of your site's credibility: fast, well-structured pages got picked up in hours, and the pages Google had ignored for months were the thin ones.

Google is not ignoring your website out of spite. It is ignoring it because nothing yet tells it your site matters. Every fix on this page is a way of telling it.

When the website itself is the blocker

Sometimes every box above is ticked and the site still barely registers, and the pattern is nearly always the same underneath: a template drowning in plugins, five-second loads on a phone, pages that share their structure with ten thousand sister sites, and content too thin to deserve a place in the results. Google's crawler has a budget, and it spends it reluctantly on slow, samey sites. That is not fixable with settings; it is the build. It is also, honestly, the moment to stop paying for patches: a rebuild that launches indexed, fast and structured costs from £675 +VAT with us, with every price published, and the indexing steps in this guide are done as part of launch rather than left as homework.

The bottom line

Run the site: search, set up Search Console, and work the table above in order: most invisible websites are one checkbox, one sitemap or one request away from appearing. Give a new site weeks rather than hours, remember that indexed and ranking are different battles, and judge any provider by whether they explain this machinery or mystify it. If you would rather have the whole thing checked properly, send us your address via the contact page, no obligation, and you will get told which of the six causes is yours, including the awkward one, for free.