A while back, I made a mistake that still stings a little.
I had a key blog post—marked as a pillar, with internal links pointing to it from everywhere—yet it wasn’t indexed by Google. Not for weeks. Not for months. For three years.
Turns out, it was stuck in a silent 301 redirect loop.

And yes, I work in digital. I check GA, GSC, all the usual suspects. But this one slipped past me completely. Because when you assume something is working, you usually stop checking.

If you’re running a blog on WordPress, this is the kind of thing that can quietly sabotage your entire content strategy without you even knowing. So here’s a dead-simple habit I now use regularly—and I recommend you do the same.

The 30-Second Sitemap Check

1. Open your XML sitemap (usually at /sitemap.xml or /post-sitemap.xml, depending on your SEO plugin).
2. Count how many URLs are listed under the blog or post sitemap.
3. Now go to your WordPress admin and check how many blog posts are published.
4. The numbers should match. If they don’t, something’s off.
   • A post might be set to noindex
   • A redirect might be looping
   • Your sitemap might not be updating
   • Or a plugin might be excluding it silently

Why This Matters

If a post isn’t in your sitemap, there’s a good chance Google doesn’t even know it exists. And no index = no rankings = no traffic. You can link to it all you want internally—but if it’s missing from the sitemap, you’re basically whispering into the void.

This kind of thing is easy to miss. Especially on bigger sites, or when you’re focused on content, not crawling errors.

Make It a Habit

I do this check once a month. It takes under a minute.
No fancy tools, no deep audits. Just a quick count to make sure what I’ve published is actually visible to search engines.

It’s now part of my quiet maintenance checklist—something I wish I had started earlier, before I lost three years of potential rankings and traffic on a single article I thought was doing just fine.