What does a sitemap do?
An XML sitemap lists the pages of your website so search engines can find them faster. It is especially useful for new sites, sites with heavy images, or pages that are not linked from the home page.
The file itself is simple: a list of URLs with a few optional details about how often each page changes and how important it is.
How to build your sitemap
- Enter your site URL. It becomes the first entry automatically.
- Paste the rest of your page URLs, one per line.
- Pick a change frequency and priority for the group.
- Add a last modified date if you want to include it.
- Copy or download the sitemap.xml file.
- Upload it to your site root and submit it in Google Search Console.
Choosing good settings
- Use daily only for pages that really change every day, like news.
- Priorities are hints, not orders. A sensible spread looks more natural.
- Only include URLs you want indexed, no filtered or duplicate pages.
- Keep the file under 50,000 URLs and 50 MB for a single file.
After you upload the file
Once the file is live at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, add it in Google Search Console under the sitemaps section. Bing can be set to import it from Google Search Console too.
Frequently Asked Questions
It tells search engines how often a page is likely to change, such as daily, weekly or yearly. It is a hint, not a command.
It signals which URLs you consider more important, from 0.1 to 1.0. Search engines may use it when deciding crawl order.
It is optional. When included and accurate, it can help search engines notice fresh content on your pages.
A single file supports up to 50,000 URLs. Larger sites should split into multiple files and use a sitemap index.
In Google Search Console, open the Sitemaps report, enter sitemap.xml and press submit. It takes a day or two to be read.
No. Leave out pages you blocked from indexing. Including them just wastes crawl time.
Yes. The download is a plain text file, so you can open it in any text editor and adjust the entries before uploading.