Submitting your site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console tells you how Google sees your site: what's indexed, what's broken, and what people searched to find you. You don't need a plugin to set it up. One straightforward path is the HTML tag method using the block editor, followed by a sitemap submission.

Verify with the HTML tag method

Go to Google Search Console and add your site as a property. Choose URL prefix, not Domain, unless you're comfortable with DNS verification. Search Console will offer several verification methods; pick HTML tag. It gives you a line that looks like this:

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="your-code-here" />

Now add that tag to your site's <head> using the block editor, no theme files involved:

1. If your theme is block-based, go to Appearance → Editor → Patterns, open (or create) a header pattern, and add a Custom HTML block right after the opening <head> content.
2. If your theme isn't block-based, most themes still expose a header/footer scripts field under Appearance → Theme Editor or a plugin-free hook in your theme's customizer; paste the meta tag there instead of editing PHP directly.
3. Save and reload your homepage. View source (Ctrl+U or Cmd+Option+U) and confirm the tag is present in the page's <head>.

Before making changes like this, it's worth having a recent backup in place, see Backing up your WordPress site. Back in Search Console, click Verify. If it fails, check that the tag wasn't stripped by a cache layer. Our default caching stack serves cached HTML for speed, so if you added the tag, purge the LiteSpeed cache from wp-admin (LiteSpeed Cache → Toolbox → Purge All) and try again. If your site still feels sluggish once verification is done, that's a separate issue worth a look: see My WordPress site is slow.

Once verified, you can remove the Custom HTML block if you'd rather not leave it in permanently, though Google recommends keeping it in place so verification doesn't lapse.

Using a plugin instead (when you'd rather not touch the block editor)

If editing the block editor isn't something you want to do by hand, a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math has a dedicated field for the Search Console verification code under its webmaster tools settings. Paste the code (just the value inside content="...", not the whole tag) and save. The plugin injects the meta tag into your head for you. This is the better route if you're not confident using the block editor, or if you're already running an SEO plugin for other reasons.

See Using WordPress staging if you'd rather test either method on a copy of your site first.

Submit your sitemap

Verification only confirms ownership. To help Google crawl your site efficiently, submit your XML sitemap. WordPress core doesn't ship a sitemap by default in older setups, but most SEO plugins (Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO) generate one automatically once activated, usually at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml.

In Search Console, go to Sitemaps in the left sidebar, enter the path (just sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml, the domain is already filled in), and click Submit. Status shows as "Success" once Google fetches it, though processing new URLs can take a few days.

If you don't have an SEO plugin and don't want one, WordPress 5.5+ includes a bare-bones sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml. It's not as feature-rich as plugin-generated ones (no priority weighting, no image sitemaps) but it's valid and submittable.

Checking indexing status

After a few days, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to check whether a specific page is indexed. Paste the URL and it'll report whether Google has it, when it was last crawled, and any issues found (redirect problems, blocked resources, etc.). For a new page you want indexed faster, use the "Request Indexing" button inside that same tool, though this doesn't guarantee immediate crawling.

The Coverage (or "Pages") report in the sidebar shows site-wide indexing health: how many pages are indexed, how many are excluded, and why. Common exclusions like "Crawled, currently not indexed" are usually not errors, Google's own prioritization. Real problems show up as "Error" rows, worth investigating individually.

When to check with support

Search Console setup itself doesn't touch your hosting configuration, so there's rarely a reason to involve us. The one exception: if verification keeps failing and you've confirmed the tag is in your page source but not showing up when Google fetches it, it could be a caching or DNS propagation issue on our end. In that case, open a ticket through the portal (Support) and a real person will check it.