Walkthrough · Beginner · 15 minutes
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google
How to give search engines a complete chart of everything you want crawled, without the guessing — the steps in order, the snag ahead of time, and the tip our support team repeats daily.
The short answer
The job: give search engines a complete chart of everything you want crawled. Time to set aside: 15 minutes. Skill needed: beginner.
Below is the full run of steps, the error most people trip over, and the short cut worth remembering. On Hosting & Domains plans several steps are already automated away — the guide marks each one.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 18 August 2026
Beginner
Experience required
5
Stages, start to finish
Free
Support included
Proven
On the platform itself
No technical background needed. This walkthrough was written for first-timers, proven on our own hardware, and honest about which parts are genuinely tricky rather than merely unfamiliar.
First rule: read the snag section before you start, not afterwards. It was distilled from the tickets of everyone who tried the other order.
The outline first, then the detail
Set out end to end, the route is: find the sitemap you already have, verify the site in search console, submit the sitemap url, read the coverage report and do the same at bing.
Every stage is a few minutes of unhurried clicking — the total depends mostly on how well you already know the control panel. The detailed instructions are further down; read the whole path once before you begin.
The error nearly everyone hits
Submitting the sitemap once and then never looking at the coverage report. It itemises exactly which pages Google declined to index and why, which means the answer to most 'why is this not ranking' questions has been sitting in one tab all along.
Forewarned is genuinely forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the topic ever causes — and it disappears entirely once somebody points it out.
A habit worth borrowing
Keep the sitemap to canonical, indexable pages only. Tag archives and thin pages dilute the signal, and a competent SEO plugin curates the list correctly by default.
Habits this small are what separate the people who find hosting effortless from the people who find it draining. The same tools on both sides — a different way of working.
The steps already done before you arrive
Some steps in this guide exist only because hosting traditionally forced them on you. Here the SSL issues itself, the copy is taken daily without being asked, and one-click installers remove the manual setup. What is left is the part that was always genuinely yours.
Stopped mid-guide at an awkward hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock support is for — say which step you are on and we take it from there.
A quick platform makes for a short guide
Tutorials written against imaginary hosting go stale fast. Ours are written against the real thing: the same panel, installer and defaults waiting in your account.
NVMe storage and LiteSpeed caching sit under every tier, the smallest plan included — that is the floor here, not an upgrade.
- Every step checked exactly as published
- The snag named before it arrives
- The dull steps taken out of your way
- People reachable at any hour you stall
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Taken from real tickets
These guides came out of the support queue, so every snag flagged is one people genuinely hit.
Every undo written out
Any step that could bite is marked, together with the exact way to wind it back.
Help that keeps your hours, not ours
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-walkthrough included.
5 steps, nothing padded
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, and the fiddly moments are labelled fiddly.
Honest about how big it is
Give search engines a complete chart of everything you want crawled is a beginner-level job — set aside 15 minutes, with the platform-absorbed steps marked.
Works exactly as printed
Every step is proven on the platform we run — none of the 'your host may vary' hedging.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Find the sitemap you already have
SEO plugins, and WordPress core itself, generate XML sitemaps automatically, usually at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Load the URL and check it displays.
- 2
Verify the site in Search Console
Domain-level verification with a DNS TXT record captures every variant at once. Google uses that property as its channel for reporting back.
- 3
Submit the sitemap URL
Search Console → Sitemaps → paste the path. Once is enough, because from then on the crawler refetches the file on its own schedule.
- 4
Read the coverage report
Discovered, indexed and excluded counts, each with a reason beside it. That report turns 'can Google see my site' from a worry into data you can act on.
- 5
Do the same at Bing
An import from Search Console into Bing Webmaster Tools takes minutes. Most sites never make that second submission, and skipping it is a mistake.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- WordPress and 400+ further applications installed in one click
- WordPress Toolkit, with the updates seen to for you
- cPanel, which is what most of the industry already runs
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- PHP versions set per site from the control panel
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- 99.9% uptime as the target, watched around the clock
- Upgrades applied in place, with no migration when you change plan
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
Frequently Asked
The questions that come up most
Does submitting a sitemap guarantee indexing?
It is an invitation rather than an instruction. Google crawls from the map, then indexes according to its own view of value and duplication. Pages listed but not indexed need stronger content or better internal links, and the coverage report points straight at them.
When does the sitemap file need updating?
It updates itself with every publish, which is what generated sitemaps do unattended. Submission happens once, and the file stays current for as long as the plugin keeps rebuilding it.
Is the free SSL certificate genuinely free?
Entirely, on every plan. The certificate is issued as soon as the name points here and reissues itself well before it lapses. On encryption it matches any paid DV certificate — the paid options exist for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Does hosting include mail?
Yes — every hosting plan includes mailboxes at your own name, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP plus spam filtering on from the start. There is standalone email hosting too, for a name whose website lives somewhere else.
Keep reading
How to Update WordPress Safely
Keep everything current without gambling on what each update might break — beginner level, about 20 minutes per cycle.
How to Minify CSS and JavaScript
Slim down and reorder how code reaches the browser, without wrecking the site on the way — intermediate level, about 30 minutes.
DNS (Domain Name System) (Glossary)
A single term without the jargon: what it means, why it counts, and where it catches people out.
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