How-to · Beginner · 15 minutes
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google
Everything you need to hand search engines a complete map of what you want crawled — the steps in order, the snag to watch, and the tip our support desk gives everybody.
Straight answer first
The job: hand search engines a complete map of what you want crawled. Time to allow: 15 minutes. Skill needed: beginner.
The walkthrough below covers every step, the mistake most people make, and the shortcut worth keeping. On Hosting Seller plans several of these steps are already done for you, and we say where.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Difficulty level
15 minutes
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
You do not need to be technical for this. The walkthrough is written for first-timers, tested on our own platform, and honest about which parts are genuinely fiddly and which are merely unfamiliar.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The overview before the detail
Here is the route in full: find the sitemap you already have, claim the site in search console, paste the sitemap address in, read the coverage report and do the same at bing.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
The mistake nearly everyone makes
Submitting once and never opening the coverage report again. That report lists 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 the whole time.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
The trick worth borrowing
The sitemap should list canonical, indexable pages only. Tag archives and thin pages dilute the signal, and a good SEO plugin curates that list correctly out of the box.
Small habits like this are the real difference between people who find hosting easy and people who find it stressful. The tools are identical; the working method is not.
The parts we have already done for you
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
A good platform makes every guide shorter
Tutorials age badly when they are written against imaginary hosting. These are written against ours: the same panel, the same installer and the same defaults you will meet.
What you pay on day one is what you pay at renewal, so the year-two invoice holds no surprises worth opening early.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Written from real tickets
Our guides come off the support desk, so the snags flagged here are the ones people genuinely hit.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
Scoped honestly
Hand search engines a complete map of what you want crawled is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets 15 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find the sitemap you already have
SEO plugins, and WordPress core, generate XML sitemaps automatically — usually at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Visit the address and check it renders.
- 2
Claim the site in Search Console
Domain-level verification with a DNS TXT record covers every variant in one move. That property is the channel through which Google reports back to you.
- 3
Paste the sitemap address in
Search Console → Sitemaps → paste the path. One submission is all it takes; the crawler refetches the file on its own schedule from then on.
- 4
Read the coverage report
Discovered, indexed and excluded counts, each with a reason attached. That report turns 'is Google seeing my site' from anxiety into data you can act on.
- 5
Do the same at Bing
Bing Webmaster Tools imports from Search Console in a couple of minutes. It is the second submission most sites skip, and they should not.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- One-click installs for WordPress and 400+ other applications
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- A free SSL certificate on every plan, reissued before it lapses
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- WebP image optimisation built in and costing nothing
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- A 30-day money-back guarantee on every hosting plan
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Will submitting the sitemap get everything indexed?
It is an invitation, not an instruction. Google crawls from the map and then indexes according to its own judgment of value and duplication. Pages listed but not indexed need better content or stronger internal links, and the coverage report flags them.
How often does the sitemap need updating?
It updates itself on every publish, which is what generated sitemaps do without anybody intervening. The submission happens once; the file stays current for as long as the plugin keeps regenerating it.
Is the SSL certificate genuinely free?
On every plan, with nothing held back. The certificate is issued the moment your domain points here and reissues itself well before expiry. The encryption is the same as a paid DV certificate — paid tiers exist only for wildcard coverage or organisation validation, which most sites never need.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Read next
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Translate each browser warning into the exact repair it is asking for — intermediate level, about 20 minutes.
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