Getting your website on Google and Bing

Google and Bing find most websites on their own, but it can take weeks. Adding your site to their free webmaster tools gets it found faster, and shows you how it’s doing in search.

Before you start

• Your website should be live on your own domain, with HTTPS working. See Your free SSL certificate.
• In WordPress, check Settings → Reading: Discourage search engines from indexing this site must be unticked.
• Have a sitemap. WordPress creates one automatically at https://yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml. SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math create https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Google Search Console

1. Go to Google Search Console and sign in with a Google account.
2. Click Add property and choose Domain. Enter your domain without https:// or www, for example example.com.
3. Google gives you a TXT record to prove you own the domain. Add it to your DNS:
   • In cPanel’s Zone Editor, or in the client area’s DNS Manager, add a TXT record for your domain with the value Google gave you.
   • See Verifying site ownership with Google.
4. Back in Search Console, click Verify. If it fails, wait 15–30 minutes and try again.
5. Open Indexing → Sitemaps, enter your sitemap address, and click Submit.

A Domain property covers every version of your site (http, https, www and subdomains), so it’s the best choice.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing also supplies results to Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others.

1. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and sign in.
2. Choose Import from Google Search Console. It copies your verified sites and sitemaps in one step.
3. Or add your site by hand and verify it with a DNS record, the same way as Google.

Check your site is in search results

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. It lists the pages Google has found. New sites can take a few days to a few weeks to appear.

In Search Console, Pages under Indexing shows which pages are included and why others aren’t. For one page, enter its address in the search bar at the top and click Request indexing.

Track your visitors

Search Console shows what people search to find you. To see what they do on your site, add Google Analytics. See Using Google Analytics with WordPress. Visitor statistics are also in cPanel under Metrics → Awstats and Visitors.

Related articles

• Cleaning up an SEO spam hack