Why is my website not showing on Google? 10 causes and fixes

You paid for a website. It is live: you can open it on your phone. But when you search Google for what you do, or even for your business name, it is nowhere. Customers who look for you find a competitor, or nothing. This guide shows you how to find out in ten minutes what is wrong, and the ten causes we find behind it, with the fix for each. Most of them are free to fix once you know which one you have.

First: which problem do you actually have?

“Not showing on Google” means one of two very different things, and the fix for one does nothing for the other.

The two-minute check

1. Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.ke (your own address, no www). If pages appear, Google has at least some of your site. If nothing appears, it probably has none. Google itself warns that this search does not always list every page it has, so treat it as a quick signal, not proof.
2. Search for your exact business name. If you appear for your name but not for “web designer Nairobi” or “tent hire Kiambu”, you have Problem B, not Problem A.

The ten-minute check that gives you Google’s own answer

Add your website to Google Search Console: it is free, and it is the only place Google tells you directly what it thinks of your site. Then paste your homepage address into the URL Inspection tool at the top. It tells you whether that page is on Google, and if it is not, why. The Page indexing report does the same for every page at once.

The 10 causes, and the fix for each

Here is what Search Console will show you for each one, in Google’s own words where it has a name for it.

1. The “do not index” setting — the most common one we find

Websites are often built with a setting that keeps them out of Google until they are ready. The mistake is forgetting to switch it off. On WordPress it is a single box: Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. When it is ticked, WordPress adds a noindex tag to every page. Custom-built websites do the same thing in code, as ours did. Google is clear that a page with noindex will not be indexed. Untick it, save, then request indexing for your homepage in Search Console.

2. robots.txt telling Google to stay out

Every website can have a small file at yourdomain.co.ke/robots.txt. Open it in your browser. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every search engine not to read anything. Remove that line. One detail catches even developers: if robots.txt blocks a page, Google cannot read the page at all, so it never sees any other instruction on it, including the one you meant.

3. A new website nobody links to

Google finds websites mostly by following links from other websites. A brand-new site that no one links to can wait weeks to be noticed. Google says so itself. The fix is to make it easy to find: submit your sitemap in Search Console (most websites have one at /sitemap.xml), add your website to your Google Business Profile, and link to it from your Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Business profiles and any directory you are listed in.

4. “Crawled — currently not indexed”

This one is uncomfortable: Google visited the page, read it, and decided it was not worth keeping. It is most common on pages that are thin, copied, or near-identical to each other, for example ten “services” pages that all say the same thing with a different heading. There is no setting to change. The fix is to make each page earn its place: your real prices, real photos of your work, the areas you serve, answers to the questions customers ask you on WhatsApp.

5. Two versions of your website

If your site opens at both www.yourbusiness.co.ke and yourbusiness.co.ke, or at both http and https, Google sees two copies and has to guess which is the real one. Choose one and make the others redirect to it permanently. We did exactly this for our own address on 29 September.

6. Hosting that goes down

If Google visits while your server is down or answering with errors, it backs off and comes back later, and if it keeps happening, pages drop out. Cheap hosting is the usual cause. Search Console’s Page indexing report shows server errors by date, so you can see whether it is a pattern.

7–9. Pages that look full but say nothing

Google reads text. A homepage that is one big designed image, a price list uploaded as a picture, or a “services” page that is only icons gives Google nothing to match a search to. The same goes for pages that load and say “coming soon” for months. Write what you do, where, and for how much, in ordinary text. And if you moved to a new website, make sure every old page address redirects to its new page, otherwise Google finds a pile of “not found” pages where your rankings used to be.

10. An expired domain or hosting account

This is one of the commonest ways we see Kenyan businesses lose a website: the domain or hosting was registered by a developer or a former staff member, the renewal reminder went to an email nobody reads, and one day the website is replaced by a “suspended” page. Google then drops it. Put the domain and hosting in the business’s name, on an email the owner controls, with auto-renew switched on.

After the fix: how long until you show?

Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, and that requesting the same page again and again does not make it faster. Request indexing once for your most important pages, submit your sitemap, and then check the Page indexing report weekly. When the count of indexed pages starts rising, you are moving.

When your pages are indexed but sit on page 4 or 5, you have moved from Problem A to Problem B, and that is a different job. It is where SEO comes in: pages built around what customers actually search, a strong Business Profile, reviews and mentions from other sites. We explain what that costs and how long it really takes in SEO in Kenya: what it costs and how long it takes, and if you are starting from zero, how to get your business on Google walks through the first setup step by step.

Your 10-minute checklist

• Search site:yourdomain: does anything come up?
• Open yourdomain/robots.txt: is there a Disallow: /?
• On WordPress: Settings → Reading: is “Discourage search engines” ticked?
• Add the site to Search Console and inspect your homepage
• Submit your sitemap in Search Console
• Check that only one version of your address opens (www or not, always https)
• Confirm the domain and hosting are in your name, with auto-renew on

Want us to look?

If you have been through the list and still cannot see why, send us your web address. We will run the same checks we ran on our own site and tell you, in plain words, what is stopping Google and what it takes to fix. If the fix is a single setting, we will tell you which one. If your site is on Google but losing to competitors, that is what our SEO service is for, and if you need a website that is built to be found from day one, see how we build websites.