Generate XML sitemaps instantly. Create properly formatted sitemaps for search engine indexing with priorities, change frequencies, and last modified dates.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website, helping search engines discover, crawl, and index your content more efficiently. It's essentially a roadmap for search engine crawlers, providing information about your pages' URLs, when they were last modified, how often they change, and their relative importance. Sitemaps are particularly valuable for large websites, new websites, or sites with complex navigation structures.
Our free XML sitemap generator simplifies the process of creating properly formatted sitemaps. Instead of manually writing XML code and ensuring proper formatting, you can add your URLs, configure priorities and change frequencies, and generate a complete, valid XML sitemap instantly. This tool creates sitemaps that comply with the sitemap protocol, ensuring compatibility with all major search engines including Google, Bing, and others.
XML sitemaps are essential for SEO and search engine visibility. They help search engines discover pages that might otherwise be difficult to find, especially pages that aren't linked from other pages or are deep within your site structure. Sitemaps also provide metadata about your pages, helping search engines prioritize crawling and understand your content better.
While search engines can discover pages through links, sitemaps ensure comprehensive coverage and faster indexing. They're particularly important for new websites, sites with limited internal linking, sites with rich media content, and international sites with multiple language versions. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can significantly improve your site's indexing speed and coverage.
Each URL entry in a sitemap includes the page's location (loc), which must be a fully qualified URL. URLs should use the same protocol (http or https) and domain as your website. The sitemap can include up to 50,000 URLs, and for larger sites, you can create multiple sitemaps and reference them in a sitemap index file.
The lastmod (last modified) field indicates when the page was last updated. This helps search engines determine if they need to recrawl a page. Use ISO 8601 date format (YYYY-MM-DD). While optional, including accurate last modified dates helps search engines prioritize fresh content and reduces unnecessary crawling of unchanged pages.
The changefreq (change frequency) field indicates how often the page content changes. Valid values include "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly", and "never". This is a hint for search engines, not a directive. Use realistic values based on your actual update frequency to help search engines optimize their crawling schedule.
The priority field indicates the relative importance of a page compared to other pages on your site. Values range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest priority. The default priority is 0.5. Use priorities to guide search engines toward your most important pages, but remember that priority is relative to your site, not across all websites.
Sitemaps work by providing search engines with a structured list of your website's URLs along with metadata. The process involves:
Search engines use sitemaps as a guide, not a requirement. They may not crawl all pages in your sitemap, and they may discover pages through other means. However, sitemaps significantly improve the likelihood of comprehensive indexing, especially for new or frequently updated content.
XML sitemaps have specific limits and guidelines:
For sites with more than 50,000 URLs, create multiple sitemaps and reference them in a sitemap index file. The sitemap index can reference up to 50,000 sitemaps, effectively allowing you to include up to 2.5 billion URLs.
After generating your sitemap, submit it to search engines:
You can also reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file using the Sitemap directive. This helps search engines discover your sitemap automatically. After submission, monitor indexing status in search console tools to ensure your pages are being discovered and indexed.
Sitemaps must be valid XML and follow the sitemap protocol. The XML should be UTF-8 encoded and properly escaped. URLs must be fully qualified (include http:// or https://) and use the same domain as your website. Our generator automatically handles XML formatting, escaping, and validation to ensure your sitemap is ready for submission.
For dynamic sites, consider generating sitemaps programmatically based on your content. Many CMS platforms and static site generators have built-in sitemap generation capabilities. For static sites, use our generator to create sitemaps that you can upload to your server.
A single sitemap can contain up to 50,000 URLs. For larger sites, create multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file.
No, you should include important pages that you want search engines to discover. Don't include pages blocked by robots.txt or pages with noindex meta tags.
Update your sitemap whenever you add new pages or make significant changes. For frequently updated sites, consider generating sitemaps dynamically or updating them regularly.
No, all URLs in sitemaps must be fully qualified (include http:// or https://). Our generator automatically converts relative URLs to absolute URLs using your base URL.
If your sitemap exceeds 50MB or 50,000 URLs, split it into multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file that references all sitemaps.