Before you publish, and the weeks after you do

Google Search Console is a free service from Google that shows you how your site appears in search results: which pages are indexed, which search terms bring people to you, and whether Google has found any errors crawling your site. It is not analytics. It tells you about Google's view of your site.

What it does not do

Registering with Search Console does not improve your ranking on its own, and it does not submit your site to other search engines. It also will not fix a broken page or a missing sitemap; it only reports what it finds. Treat it as a diagnostic tool.

Verifying ownership with a DNS TXT record

Before Google will show you any of this, it needs proof that you control the site. The most reliable way to do that for a small site is a DNS TXT record: a short line of text you add through wherever your domain's DNS is managed, usually your registrar (the company that holds your domain name) or your host. Google gives you a unique text string, you paste it into a new TXT record, and Google checks for it.

1. Sign in to Search Console and add your domain as a property.
2. Choose domain-level verification and copy the TXT value Google provides.
3. Add a new TXT record with that value where your domain's DNS records are managed.
4. Return to Search Console and confirm. This can take a few minutes or considerably longer, because DNS changes take time to propagate (spread out to the servers that answer domain lookups worldwide).

If you have already set up DNS records for your domain, for a mailbox or an HTTPS certificate, this is the same process in the same place. See Domains, DNS and Hosting, Explained Once if the terms registrar, host and DNS record are still not settled in your head before you start.

Once verified, leave the TXT record in place. Removing it can cause Search Console to lose the connection to your site, and you would need to verify again.

What the first month actually tells you

In the first few weeks after launch, the useful signal is not a dashboard of traffic graphs but a short list of practical questions: are visitors reaching the page they came for, does the enquiry form deliver to an inbox someone actually checks, and does every link on the site still point somewhere real. None of that needs a tool that tracks individuals across the web.

Measuring visits without tracking people

Some analytics services count visits and page views without setting a tracking cookie or building a profile of the visitor. Because PECR, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 that govern cookies and similar technologies in the UK, mainly concerns itself with tracking that identifies or follows a person, a cookieless counter of this kind usually sits outside that requirement and can run without a consent banner. A tool that sets tracking cookies for advertising or cross-site profiling is a different matter, and needs consent under PECR before it fires.

What to check, week by week

• Send a test enquiry through the form yourself and confirm it arrives.
• Look at which pages visitors land on first, and whether that matches the question you built the page to answer
• Check for any link, internal or external, that returns the 404 page
• Open the site on an actual phone.
• Confirm the HTTPS padlock is still showing and the certificate has not lapsed

A month is long enough to see a pattern. If nobody is reaching the page that answers your most common customer question, that's a sign the navigation or the wording needs adjusting.

Where this guide stops

Getting people to the site, through search advertising, social media, email campaigns or search ranking, is a separate discipline with its own decisions, and deliberately sits outside this guide. What comes next, once the site is live and stable, is keeping it that way: renewing the domain before it lapses, updating content that goes stale, and watching for the certificate or plugin update that quietly breaks something. See Keeping a Small Site Alive for that. If the enquiry form itself needs attention, whether it's storing data properly or naming a lawful basis for holding it, that's covered in Enquiry Forms and Visitor Data, Done Properly.