Create professional XML sitemaps to help search engines discover and index your website pages. Set custom priorities, change frequencies, and last modified dates for optimal SEO performance.
Enter complete URLs including https://. Invalid URLs will be highlighted.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <!-- Add URLs to generate sitemap --> </urlset>
Add your URLs and configure priorities and change frequencies.
Download the sitemap.xml file to your computer.
Upload the file to your website's root directory.
Submit your sitemap URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website, helping search engines discover and crawl your content more efficiently. It provides metadata about each page including when it was last updated, how often it changes, and its relative importance. While search engines can find pages through links, a sitemap ensures they don't miss any important content and helps with faster indexing of new or updated pages.
After uploading your sitemap.xml file to your website's root directory, submit it to search engines: Google: Use Google Search Console, go to "Sitemaps" and enter your sitemap URL (e.g., https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Bing: Use Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap URL in the "Sitemaps" section. You can also reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file by adding "Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml".
Priority (0.0-1.0): Indicates the relative importance of pages on your site. Your homepage might be 1.0, main category pages 0.8-0.9, and individual posts 0.6-0.7. This helps search engines understand which pages are most important to you. Change Frequency: Tells search engines how often a page is likely to change (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never). This helps them decide how often to recrawl the page, though it's treated as a hint rather than a command.
A single XML sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50MB when uncompressed. If your site has more URLs, you'll need to create multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file to reference them all. For most websites, a single sitemap is sufficient. Large sites like e-commerce stores or news sites often split sitemaps by content type (products, categories, blog posts) or by date to stay within these limits.
Include pages that you want search engines to index and that provide value to users. Include: Main pages, blog posts, product pages, category pages, and important landing pages. Exclude: Thank you pages, login pages, duplicate content, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages with noindex tags, and low-value pages like search result pages. Focus on quality over quantity - it's better to have a smaller sitemap with important pages than a large one with irrelevant content.
Update your sitemap whenever you add new pages, remove pages, or make significant changes to existing content. For dynamic sites, consider automating sitemap generation through your CMS or using plugins. Static sites: Update manually when content changes. Blogs: Update when publishing new posts. E-commerce: Update when adding/removing products. Many CMS platforms can automatically generate and update sitemaps, which is the most efficient approach for frequently updated sites.
No, submitting a sitemap doesn't guarantee that search engines will crawl or index your pages. It's a suggestion, not a command. Search engines use sitemaps as one of many signals to discover content, but they still evaluate each page based on quality, relevance, and other ranking factors. However, sitemaps significantly improve your chances of discovery and can speed up the indexing process, especially for new sites or pages that are hard to find through internal linking.