Google Can't Find Your WordPress Site. Fix the Index First.

A client will tell you the site is "not ranking." Open Search Console. Half the time the pages were never in the index. Ranking talk is a waste until Google can fetch the URL and keep it.

This is not a keyword course. It is the owner checklist you run before you pay anyone for SEO.

First test: can Google even see the URL?

Paste the homepage and one inner page into Search Console URL Inspection. You want:

• URL is on Google
• Last crawl is recent
• Canonical matches the URL you care about
• robots.txt is not blocking the path

If inspection says Discovered - currently not indexed or Crawled - currently not indexed, do not start rewriting titles. Fix why the page is being skipped.

The four blocks that hide a live site

1. noindex left on after launch. Staging plugins, "coming soon" tools, and security suites love to stamp noindex on production. View source. Search for noindex. If it is there and the site is public, remove it today.
2. robots.txt blocking / or /wp-content/. A leftover Disallow from a migrate can starve the crawler. Keep robots simple. Block only admin and junk query strings.
3. The sitemap is empty or pointing at the old domain. Open /wp-sitemap.xml (or the Yoast/Rank Math sitemap). Click through. If URLs 404 or still say .local, the map is lying.
4. Thin or duplicate archives. Tag archives, author archives, and paginated date archives look like content to you and like noise to Google. Noindex the thin ones. Keep the real pages.

A staging workflow exists so these flags stay on the copy, not the live site.

Titles and descriptions do not get you indexed

They help after the page is in. Until then, they are furniture.

When you do write them:

• One clear title per page. Say the job the page does.
• Description is a sentence a human would click, not a keyword dump.
• Do not paste the same description on every service page.

Keep SEO fields in the editor metadata. Do not dump them into the body of the page.

Speed and media still matter for the crawl budget

A heavy media library and a bloated plugin stack make crawls expensive. Google will sample the site and leave. Compress images. Kill plugins you cannot name a job for.

Same rule as backups: unglamorous hygiene beats another dashboard widget.

Forms and login pages are not the homepage

Your contact form should convert. It does not need to rank. Your login should be hard to find, not featured in the sitemap. noindex utility pages. Index the pages that earn the click.

A 20-minute owner pass

• Search Console: property verified on the exact domain (www vs non-www, http vs https).
• URL Inspection on home + one money page.
• View source for noindex and a correct canonical.
• Open the sitemap. Spot-check five URLs.
• robots.txt: no sitewide Disallow.
• Settings → Reading: "Discourage search engines" is off on production.
• Redirect old domain and naked domain to the one canonical host.

If that pass is clean and the page is still out after a few weeks, the page is thin or the site is new. Publish one useful page. Do not launch twenty empty service stubs.

What not to buy yet

You do not need a new SEO suite because Search Console already tells you the state of the index. You do not need another course. You need the live site crawlable, the sitemap honest, and one page that answers a real search.

The block editor is enough to ship that page. 7.1 notes still apply: update core on staging first so a security plugin does not flip visibility flags during a rushed patch.

If you are still on the wrong host for this work, reread the self-hosted vs .com split and then come back to the index.

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If this saved you an afternoon of guessing, a coffee helps the next checklist land: ko-fi.com/jstrange.

Official docs and software: WordPress.org.