Google Indexing for WordPress
WordPress makes publishing easy and indexing invisible, which is a bad combination. You press publish, the post appears, and nothing tells you whether Google ever kept it.
Check the setting that breaks everything
Settings → Reading → Search engine visibility.
If "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is ticked, nothing else on this page matters. WordPress adds a noindex directive site-wide and Google obeys it.
It gets ticked during development and forgotten at launch constantly. Check it first, every time, on every site.
What your SEO plugin does and does not do
Yoast, Rank Math and SEO Framework all generate an XML sitemap automatically and keep it updated. That is genuinely useful and it is most of what they do for indexing.
What they do not do is make Google read it, crawl the URLs, or index them. The sitemap is a suggestion.
They also let you set noindex per post type, which is worth using. Tag archives, author archives and date archives generate a lot of thin URLs that compete for crawl attention without earning any traffic. Turning them off is often the highest-value indexing change on a WordPress site, and it is a checkbox.
Instant indexing plugins
Several plugins push new posts through Google's Indexing API when you publish.
They work in the sense that Google usually accepts the request. The problem is that Google's Indexing API is officially supported for job postings and live stream pages only. General blog posts are outside the documented scope, and Google has no obligation to keep accepting them.
For a personal blog, fine. For a business that depends on organic traffic, you are building on something that could stop working without notice.
Full detail: Google Indexing API
The gap every WordPress plugin shares
They all fire on publish.
New post goes out, plugin pings, page gets indexed. Good.
Now consider the 600 posts you published before you installed it. The plugin has done nothing for any of them, and never will, because the trigger is an event that already happened.
That archive is where the indexing gaps usually are. Older posts are the most likely to have quietly dropped out, and the least likely to be checked.
A sensible WordPress indexing setup
- Confirm search engine visibility is not discouraged.
- Install one SEO plugin. One. Two sitemaps and two sets of meta tags cause more problems than they solve.
- Noindex tag, author and date archives unless you have a genuine reason to keep them.
- Verify in Search Console and submit the sitemap.
- Fix your internal linking. Posts reachable only from page 14 of the blog archive are effectively invisible.
- Check the Pages report monthly rather than assuming.
That handles a small site well.
When the site outgrows it
Past a few hundred posts, the manual parts stop happening. Nobody checks the Pages report every month for four years, and the archive quietly rots.
Daily Indexing crawls your whole WordPress site once a day, rebuilds the sitemap from every page on it, and keeps it current so Google can discover eligible pages. Changed URLs are pushed to Bing, Yandex, Naver and Seznam through IndexNow. Old posts included, every day, whether you touched them or not. See how to index your website on Google for the full route map, or why Google is not indexing your pages if specific posts are missing.
The crawling and the daily sitemap rebuild happen on our side, from your domain name alone. Two things have to sit on your own site, because search engines will not accept them anywhere else: your IndexNow key, and a line in robots.txt naming your sitemap. On WordPress that is our one-click connector plugin. It adds no pages, no scripts and no front-end weight, so it will not conflict with your existing SEO plugin or slow the site down. If you would rather install nothing, we send you the two lines to add by hand instead.
From £29 a month, per site, no VAT. Live by the next working day.