You've just launched a new WordPress website. You search for your business name on Google and nothing comes up. Or you check your rankings a week after launch and your site is completely invisible. This is more common than you'd think — and in most cases, the cause is a simple setting that takes seconds to fix.
Reason 1: "Discourage search engines" is turned on
This is the most common cause, and it's entirely WPDA's fault about 30% of the time — this setting often gets left on from development. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings → Reading. Look for a checkbox that says "Discourage search engines from indexing this site." If it's checked, uncheck it immediately and save. This tells Google not to index your site, and it's checked by default during development to prevent staging sites from appearing in search.
Reason 2: Google hasn't crawled your site yet
New domains can take 1–4 weeks to appear in Google's index. This is normal. Speed it up by submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console: go to search.google.com/search-console, add your property, and submit your XML sitemap (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml). You can also use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to request indexing for your homepage directly.
Reason 3: Your pages have a noindex tag
Some SEO plugins (Yoast, Rank Math) can set individual pages to "noindex" — telling Google to find but not show the page in results. Check your homepage and key pages in your SEO plugin: look for a "Advanced" or "Robots" tab and make sure it's set to "Index" (not noindex). Also check that your SEO plugin's global settings don't have posts, pages or the homepage set to noindex.
Reason 4: Your XML sitemap isn't being submitted
Google discovers your pages much faster when you submit a sitemap. If you're using Yoast or Rank Math, your sitemap is generated automatically at /sitemap_index.xml. Submit this URL in Google Search Console under Sitemaps. Check the sitemap loads in a browser — if it shows an error, your SEO plugin may have a configuration issue.
Reason 5: Your robots.txt file is blocking Google
Check your robots.txt file by going to yoursite.com/robots.txt in your browser. You should see something like:
User-agent: * Allow: / Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
If you see "Disallow: /" it means your site is telling all crawlers to stay away. This is a common issue on sites migrated from development environments where the robots.txt was set to block everything. Edit the file (via FTP or your SEO plugin) to remove the blanket disallow.
What to check in Google Search Console
If you've confirmed all five settings are correct and your site is still not appearing, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on your homepage. The report will tell you: whether Google has crawled the page, when it was last crawled, whether it's indexed, and if there are any indexing issues. The Coverage report shows all pages Google has found and their status — "Excluded" pages with the reason "Noindex" or "Crawl anomaly" will show up here.
WordPress SEO services — ongoing rankings for UK businesses →ImportantEven after fixing these issues, it takes time for Google to re-crawl and reflect the changes. Use the URL Inspection tool to request re-indexing for critical pages. Most pages are re-indexed within 1–3 days after a manual request.