Do you want to create a sitemap for your WordPress site?
Sitemap improves the crawling of your site and allows search engines to better crawl your website.
In this article, I’m going to share how to create an XML sitemap in WordPress.
What is XML Sitemap
Sitemaps contain the URLs of your website that tell search engines about all the pages that are present on their website.
A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site and also provides valuable information about these files – When the page was last updated, how often the page is changed.
Why You Need an XML Sitemap
When it comes to improving your ranking, then XML Sitemaps can help you greatly. This helps Google and other main search engines better crawl your website and understand your website structure easily.
In addition, if your site is very large, you’ll need a sitemap.
Here’s a quick guide – Why you should create a Sitemap:
- There are too many internal links on your site.
- If your site is brand new and has few external links to it.
- Your website has dynamic pages.
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or not well linked to each other.
How to Create XML Sitemap for WordPress
Here I will use some best plugins and tools to create an XML Sitemap. You can use any of them.
So let’s get started…
1. Create Sitemap Using Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast is a very popular WordPress SEO plugin that provide tons of features (content analysis, meta keywords and description, XML sitemaps, social features, rich snippets, and much more).
If you are already using the Yoast plugin, you can easily create an XML Sitemap with its help.
First, navigate to General >> Features >> XML Sitemaps >> ?. You can see in the screenshot below.
This will redirect you to the XML Sitemap page. As you can see in the screenshot.
Copy the URL from the address bar of your browser. This will be your Sitemap and will look like this,
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
2. Create Sitemap Using Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps create XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and major search engines to better index your site.
The plugin supports all types of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Apart from this, it notifies all the major search engines every time you publish a new post.
Just install and activate the plugin then click on Settings >> XML-Sitemap. Its default settings work perfect for most sites. But if you like, you can customize it.
Your Sitemap is ready and will look like this.
3. Create Sitemap Using Jetpack
If you are already using the Jetpack plugin on your site, you can easily create a sitemap for your WordPress site with the help of Jetpack.
To enable Sitemaps, go to Jetpack >> Settings >> Traffic and enable Generate XML Sitemaps option. Once activated, Jetpack will generate two different sitemaps for you: a sitemap listing all your public posts and pages, and a News sitemap built specifically for Google News.
Your sitemap will be – https://yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml and look like this.
4. Create Sitemap without Plugin
First, visit XML-Sitemap.com. This is a free online Google sitemap generator. Just enter your website URL and hit on START.
This will take some time to crawl your website and it depends how big your site is.
After crawling it will give you the option to download sitemap. Click on VIEW SITEMAP DETAILS.
Then click on DOWNLOAD YOUR XML SITEMAP.
Its free version adds 500 URLs to your sitemap. For more URL, you must upgrade to its Pro version.
I hope this article helped you create a sitemap for your WordPress website.
We’re done, and it’s now your turn! Find this article helpful? Don’t forget to share!
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