November 23, 2020
3min Read
Domantas G.
Using a WordPress sitemap can bring a positive impact to your website. Creating one helps search engine bots to crawl and index your site more easily. Thus, it’ll improve your web pages’ visibility to search engines.
How do you create a WordPress sitemap? In this article, we will show you what a sitemap is and how to create one in WordPress.
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A sitemap is a list that navigates both its visitors and search engines to every accessible page on a website.
However, sitemaps are even more important today from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view. Here are a few reasons why WordPress sitemaps are important:
Sitemaps can be categorized into two types – XML and HTML.
The main difference between the two is that XML focuses on the search engines, while an HTML sitemap is written for website visitors.
It’s recommended to have both WordPress sitemaps for your website. It ensures that you are not missing any essential elements related to SEO, guaranteeing the optimum experience of your visitors.
For new blogs with not so many backlinks, a sitemap helps in quick indexing of the web pages. Now, let’s see how to add both sitemaps to WordPress!
One of the easiest ways to generate an XML sitemap is by using a plugin. Here are some of the best available options:
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins for improving WordPress website’s SEO. This plugin takes care of all the technical aspects related to content and helps you track the keyword density and readability. It can also assist you in creating XML sitemaps.
This plugin provides an easy way of generating a WordPress sitemap for a wide range of search engines. It can also create sitemaps for all WordPress pages and custom URLs. Furthermore, it automatically notifies all major search engines whenever new content is posted or published.
Now, if you want to create an HTML sitemap page on your WordPress site, you can use the WP Sitemap Page plugin by following these steps:
[wp_sitemap_page]
Once the XML sitemap URLs generated, you can submit them to various search engines like Google or Bing.
Before we begin, submit your sitemap to Google by verifying the website’s owner via Google Search Console.
If your site contains a lot of images or videos, we would highly recommend you create a sitemap for them as well.
You can use the Webmaster tool to submit a sitemap to Bing. However, you need to verify the ownership of your website first. During the verification process, enter your WordPress XML sitemap URL and press Save.
Sitemaps are beneficial for any website since their main aim is to create a user-friendly website. They can also help to secure the top ranking on search engine result pages and contribute to crawl and index your site more quickly.
If you have any questions, share them in the comment section below.
March 15 2018
Thankkss so much
March 18 2018
Hi Lindsay Thanks for the detailed article. I tried creating sitemaps using Yoast SEO and Google sitemaps creator but i failed. When i go to mywebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml it says http error 500. I disabled yoast and enabled again, tried disabling all the plugins still unsuccessful. Is there anything i need to change in .htacess as well?
Replied on March 23 2018
Hey Hunter, There should be no need to change anything in your .htaccess unless you are using custom .htaccess rules. In this case, try switching back to default WordPress .htaccess: https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/create-default-wordpress-htaccess-file
Replied on March 25 2018
Thanks for your response. I was using custom .htaccess After some digging found out the error is because of WP MEMORY LIMIT, I increased it to 256MB and it was fixed.
Replied on March 26 2018
Hey Hunter, Glad to you know you manage to fix it!
February 10 2019
Thanks it was very useful. I used the google plugin as suggested by you. It's working absolutely fine.
June 28 2019
Domantas, WP Sitemap Page is only supported up to 4.9.10 as of this writing. What other plugins would you recommend?
Replied on September 24 2019
Hey Aaron, WP Sitmap Page creators updated the plugin. THere should not be any problems running it on latest WordPress version (WordPress 5.2.3)
July 29 2019
Very nice!
August 25 2019
does sitemap help in google ranking
Replied on September 24 2019
Hey Satendra Kumar, Not directly. Sitemap.xml helps Google to discover what pages you have and index them.
October 23 2019
This very informative. Glad you share
April 19 2020
Hey Domantas G., Your article helped me a lot as I am a newbie without any technical expertise. Your article was very simple and illustrative. I submitted my .xml and .html sitemaps easily in a hassle-free way. Thank you for the article.
June 03 2020
Thank you so much. That was really helpful...
June 15 2020
Thanks for your work
June 29 2020
Thanks for the blog, You have illustrated everything very well. I had Yoast plugin installed but never tried xml sitemap.
July 07 2020
Thanks this is very informative
August 17 2020
I installed the Yoast SEO plugin to my wordpress site but couldn't find XML Sitemaps under Setting. can you please advise?
Replied on November 06 2020
Hey there Ted! :) I can't fully check your issue through the comments section, but if you are hosting with us, please message your Customer Success team and I am sure you will get help asap! :)
September 02 2020
A bit of digging has found a solution to the failure of my sitemap to load: I just had to re-save my permalink settings.
September 12 2020
Very helpful thanks very much, it worked
Replied on November 11 2020
Hey there. Happy to hear it helped.
October 19 2020
Have used both XML and HTML sitemaps. Is there an application where I can trace page links to draw out a Map of Pages and also check broken links?
Replied on February 02 2021
Hi, Robert! You can find and fix all of your broken links following this article.
November 22 2020
Thanks very much, really helped! Been using Yoast
Domantas G.
Replied on March 23 2018
Hi Kirill, Glad this tutorial helped!