struggling with Search Console - Sitemap.xml

Good afternoon all, 

I opened my site up to Google Search console about a week ago and added the sitemap.xml to the relevant place.

5 days later and Google is still reporting "Cant Fetch".  I have tried removing and re-adding, adding with or without https and www and also adding an extra / (as per one users suggestion).

No matter what I try, the sitemap will not be fetched.

I am having to manually add pages to search console 1 by 1 to get them to show up on google which is very frustrating.

I have verified the sitemap is present (browser) and correctly formatted (online checker)

Has anyone got a solution for this?

many thanks

Dan

Just now, paul2009 said:

This can happen if your site is detected by Google before the site is made public. Use Live Test to check if Googlebot can fetch the sitemap. If Google returns "URL is available to Google", that means Google can fetch your sitemap but hasn't. You can then interpret the status as "Pending" and wait. It will take some time for your site to be crawled (days to weeks depending on the size of the site - larger more important sites will appear first).

Before Google does crawl your site, I recommend you edit all your images to remove the default demo text, "Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference". This is caused by a Squarespace bug and, if not deleted manually, will be indexed with your site. See my post for more details.

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thank you paul, much appreciated, i will absolutely act on your advice !