A website not showing up on Google is almost always caused by one of a few specific issues: the site is genuinely new and hasn't been indexed yet, something is actively blocking search engines from it, or the site has no pages worth ranking for the search terms being tried. Work through these in order.
1. Confirm It's Actually Not Indexed
Search Google directly for site:yourdomain.com (replacing with your actual domain, no spaces). If pages appear, your site is indexed, and the real issue is ranking position rather than visibility, which is a different problem with different fixes. If nothing appears, move on to the checks below.
2. Check How New the Site Is
A newly launched site can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to get indexed, even with nothing wrong. If your site went live recently, submit its sitemap to Google Search Console rather than waiting for Google to discover it on its own.
3. Check for a Noindex Tag
Some sites accidentally ship with a setting that tells search engines not to index the site at all, often left over from a staging or development phase. On WordPress, check Settings > Reading and confirm Discourage search engines from indexing this site is unchecked. If it's checked, uncheck it and give Google time to recrawl.
4. Check robots.txt
Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt directly in a browser. If it contains a line like Disallow: /, it's blocking search engines from crawling the entire site. This file should only block specific sections you genuinely don't want indexed, such as an admin area, not the whole site.
5. Check Search Console Coverage
If your site is verified in Google Search Console, the Pages report under Indexing shows exactly why individual pages aren't indexed, duplicate content, a crawl error, or a manual action, rather than leaving you guessing.
6. Check for a Manual or Security Action
In rare cases, a site can be removed from search results for a policy violation or because it was compromised and started serving malicious content. Search Console flags this under Security & Manual Actions if it applies.
If you've only just registered the domain, wait until the site is fully live with real content before troubleshooting further. Search engines have nothing to index until then, and no configuration change will speed that up.
Ranking vs Visibility
If your site is indexed but doesn't appear for the searches you expect, that's a ranking issue rather than an indexing one. It usually comes down to weak on-page content, few or no other sites linking to yours, or strong competition for that specific search term, and it improves gradually rather than with a single fix.