Discovered, currently not indexed means Google knows a page exists, usually from your sitemap or a link, but has not yet fetched it. The page has not been judged and rejected. It has been queued and left there. On a small site that almost always means Google has not found a reason to prioritise it, not that your server is overloaded.
What Google actually says it means
Google's own definition is that the page was found but not crawled yet, typically because crawling it was expected to overload the site, so the crawl was rescheduled. That wording describes large sites. On a site with sixty pages, no crawler is worried about overloading anything.
For small sites the practical meaning is priority. Google's crawling decisions are driven partly by how much it wants to fetch a page, and that demand comes from links pointing at it, how the rest of the site has behaved when crawled before, and whether anything on the web suggests the page matters. A new page on a new site, linked from nowhere but the sitemap, scores low on all three.
Why the sitemap does not fix it
A sitemap tells Google a URL exists. Google says plainly that it does not guarantee the URL will be crawled or indexed. Resubmitting the sitemap or requesting indexing for each page tells Google the same thing again and changes nothing about why it declined the first time.
The status also tends to appear in a block. If Google has never been given a reason to fetch one section of a site, it usually has no reason to fetch any of it, which is why forty pages can sit in this state together while the homepage is crawled daily.
What moves a page out of it
Links. A page linked from a page that Google already crawls regularly, using descriptive anchor text, gets discovered in context and fetched on the next visit to the linking page. That is the cheapest fix available and it is entirely in your control. Start with the pages that already earn impressions in Search Console and link from them to the ones that do not.
Links from other websites do the same job with more force, because they raise the page's importance in Google's eyes rather than only announcing it. Over time, a site whose pages consistently turn out to be worth indexing gets crawled more eagerly across the board.
Deleting or consolidating pages that genuinely have no reason to exist also helps, because it stops the site spending its limited attention on them. Thin tag pages, near-duplicate variants and empty category pages are the usual culprits.
How it differs from crawled, currently not indexed
The two statuses look alike and mean different things. Discovered means Google has not looked. Crawled means Google looked and chose not to keep the page, at least for now. The first is a priority problem. The second is more likely a quality or duplication problem, and it needs a different response.
In the tracker, the Search Console tab shows which pages earn impressions. A page in your sitemap that has never had an impression in sixteen months is either one of these two, or it is indexed for queries nobody types.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
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Related terms
Crawled, currently not indexed
Crawled, currently not indexed means Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to include it in search results for now. It may be indexed later without you doing anything. Unlike the discovered status, this one is a judgement about the page or the site, not a queue.
Internal linking
Internal linking is linking from one page on your website to another. It is how Google discovers most of your pages, how it works out which ones you consider important, and how it learns what each page is about from the words used to link to it. It is also the one ranking lever that costs nothing and that you control completely.
Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file listing the URLs on your site that you want search engines to find, usually at yourbrand.com/sitemap.xml. Google says it helps discovery and does not guarantee that anything in it will be crawled or indexed. A small, well-linked site may not need one; most sites should have one anyway, because it is free and it is how you tell Google what changed.
Crawl budget
Crawl budget is the set of URLs on your site that Google can and wants to crawl, limited on one side by what your server can handle and on the other by how much Google wants your pages. Google says the concept matters for sites with a million or more pages, or ten thousand or more that change daily. A small business site does not have a crawl budget problem. It may have a crawl demand problem, which is different.