Submit your sitemap to Google and Bing

Submitting your sitemap is the most direct way to tell Google and Bing what pages exist on your site and that you want them indexed. Without submission, search engines still find your pages eventually by following links, but submission speeds that process — especially for new sites or newly added pages that don't yet have external links pointing to them.

In Google Search Console, go to Indexing → Sitemaps. Enter your sitemap URL, which for a Webflow site is typically https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Webflow generates this sitemap automatically based on your published pages and CMS items. Click Submit. GSC will process it and show you how many URLs were submitted versus how many were indexed. This gap is one of the most useful numbers in GSC — a large discrepancy between submitted and indexed usually points to content quality problems (thin pages, duplicate content) or crawling issues.

For Bing: in Bing Webmaster Tools, go to Sitemaps and submit the same URL. Bing has a smaller market share than Google but still accounts for a meaningful percentage of search traffic, especially in the US and for certain demographics. The submission process is identical and takes two minutes.

After submission, check back in GSC within a few days. Look at the "Sitemaps" section to see whether any errors were flagged. Common errors: pages in the sitemap that return 404, pages that redirect to a different URL, and pages that are set to noindex (contradicting their presence in the sitemap). Fix these before the next crawl cycle.

One thing Webflow handles automatically: when you publish new pages or CMS items, Webflow updates the sitemap. You don't need to resubmit after every publish. GSC re-crawls submitted sitemaps periodically on its own. That said, if you've made a large structural change to your site — added a new CMS collection, restructured your URL hierarchy — it's worth manually submitting again to prompt a fresh crawl.

Check the sitemap submission status in GSC as part of your monthly review. It's a fast check: open the Sitemaps report, verify the last fetch date, and confirm there are no new errors since the previous month.