anyone actually indexing a website successfully?

Yes, but new sites are slow, so think weeks rather than days. What actually moves it: - submit the sitemap in Search Console and check it reads without errors - run URL Inspection on the key pages and hit Request indexing (it's limited per day, so save it for the pages that matter) - link to new pages from pages that are already indexed, ideally the homepage or the menu - make sure nothing is blocking it: a noindex left on from the staging site, robots.txt, or the WordPress discourage search engines box If the Pages report says crawled - currently not indexed, that's Google deciding the page isn't worth it yet. More requests won't fix that, a better or more distinct page will.