It was forty-one pages. One Tuesday night last March, that's how many posts on my hiking gear blog sat under "Discovered, currently not indexed" in Search google indexer Console, and I kept clicking Request Indexing like it owed me money.
It let me through about ten times. Then came the message telling me to come back tomorrow.
A page Google hasn't indexed earns exactly nothing, and that blog pays my car insurance, so yes, I care about this more than I'd like to admit. After trying a few, my search for a website indexer ended with a clear favorite. Short version: WebsiteIndexer.io is the best website indexer I've used in 2026. The longer version is below, parts I got wrong included.
So What Does A Website Indexer Even Do?
Good question, honestly. Honestly, I didn't know either.
Google crawls the web when it feels like it, and small sites end up near the back of the line. You hit publish, the sitemap updates, and then... nothing happens. Nothing for days. Sometimes for weeks. (I waited 34 days once, on a review of a $60 headlamp. It hit page one the week after it finally got indexed, which made the wait more annoying, not less.)
A website indexer pushes your URLs toward the search engines so they get crawled sooner. You'll see the same thing sold as a page indexer, a url indexer, a site indexer or a google indexer, depending on whose landing page you're reading, and as far as I can tell it's mostly one job wearing different hats. A guy in a Facebook group once tried to sell me a "domain indexer" for $97. I asked him what it did differently. No answer ever came.
None of them can make a thin page good, though. Anyone pitching an instant indexer that gets you on page one by lunch, or promising "guaranteed rankings," is selling you something else.
What I Tried Before I Paid a Cent
I started free, because I'm cheap.
- Search Console's Request Indexing button. It works, but you paste one URL at a time and the daily cap is tiny. Fine for a post or two. With forty-one, it's miserable.
- IndexNow. When a page changes, this free protocol pings Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver. Great idea, and my WordPress plugin turned it on in two clicks. But Google doesn't use it, and Google is where my traffic lives.
- Hacking the Google Indexing API. A YouTube video said it worked for any page, so I spent a whole Saturday at my kitchen table setting up a service account in Google Cloud. The API is meant for job postings and livestream pages, according to Google's own docs. I used it for a couple of weeks anyway. It sort of worked. I didn't love the feeling, and I stopped.
That last one is the thing I got wrong. I thought the "free hack" was the smart move. What it actually cost me was a Saturday and some peace of mind, for patchy results.
Why I Picked WebsiteIndexer.io as My Website Indexer
I've got a friend, Marcus, whose recipe site is about ten times the size of mine. He didn't even look up from his phone when I complained to him over coffee at a Starbucks off Route 9. "Stop babysitting Search Console," he said. "Paste the list, close the tab, check it Friday."
He was talking about WebsiteIndexer.io.
So I tried it on the forty-one stuck pages. Pasting them in one batch took maybe a minute, and then I did what Marcus said and walked away. By the end of that week most of them showed as indexed in Search Console. A handful stayed stuck, and honestly, when I looked at them again, those were weak posts that probably didn't deserve a spot.
Here's the part I didn't expect to care about: it takes any URL, not only mine, so it doubles as a link indexer. Back in April, a gear shop linked to my stove guide, on a page Google clearly hadn't visited in months. So I dropped that page in as well. That's really all a backlink indexer is, and I'd been paying attention to the wrong half of the problem for years.
So why did it beat the other two paid ones I poked at? Mostly laziness, if I'm honest. I paste a list and I'm done. Its dashboard shows which URLs made it and which didn't, so there's no refreshing Search Console at midnight. There's also nothing to install on my site, which I'll happily take after the Saturday I lost to service accounts.
Could another website indexer do the same job? Possibly. I didn't test every one out there, and I'm not going to pretend I did. But I tried three, and WebsiteIndexer.io is the one I still have open in a tab.
If You're Just Starting Out
Start by fixing the page. I know it's boring. But Google might index a post that's 300 copyright of nothing on Monday and quietly drop it by the 20th, and you'll blame the tool.
Your sitemap matters more than people think. I had 212 tag pages in mine until last year (no idea why I let that happen), and cutting them made my real posts get crawled faster.
After that, use your website indexer on the stuff you care about, like a new post, a guide you just rewrote, or a backlink someone gave you on a site Google barely visits.
I still can't say how much of my March bump came from the tool and how much came from me finally cleaning up those posts. Probably both. But that "come back tomorrow" message hasn't shown up since, and that alone was worth it.
By the way, the headlamp review is still on page one.