XML Sitemap Generator

What an XML sitemap is for

An XML sitemap is a list of the pages on a site that you want search engines to know about, along with when each one last changed. It does not make pages rank. What it does is make them discoverable, which matters most for exactly the pages that struggle: new articles nothing links to yet, deep pages several clicks from the home page, and large sites where crawlers give up before they reach the end.

This generator crawls a website the way a search engine would, following internal links from the address you give it, and builds the sitemap files from what it finds.

Every format you are likely to need

One crawl produces all of these, and you can switch between them without starting again:

• XML sitemap – the standard urlset file every search engine reads, with optional lastmod, changefreq and priority.
• Sitemap index – when a site passes the 50,000 URL limit the file is split automatically and an index is produced that points at each part.
• Image sitemap – the images found on each page with their alt text, either embedded in the main sitemap or as a separate file.
• Video sitemap – self-hosted video plus YouTube and Vimeo embeds, with thumbnails and player URLs.
• Google News sitemap – built from each article’s published date, with your publication name and language.
• TXT sitemap – the plain one-URL-per-line format, which search engines also accept.
• HTML sitemap – a styled page for human visitors, grouped by section.
• CSV – every URL with its title, crawl depth, last-modified date and image and video counts, for auditing rather than submitting.

How to use the file once you have it

1. Download the XML file.
2. Upload it to the root of your site so it sits at https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Add a line to your robots.txt reading Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
4. Submit that address once in Google Search Console under Sitemaps, and in Bing Webmaster Tools.

A generated file is a snapshot

This is the part most sitemap generators are quiet about. The file you download is accurate on the day you download it and out of date the moment you publish your next article. For a site that rarely changes, that is fine. For a blog, it is a problem, because you would have to remember to regenerate and re-upload it every time you post.

If your site runs on WordPress, use the free companion plugin offered above instead. It generates the same formats on request rather than in advance, so the sitemap always reflects what is actually published, and it submits new and changed URLs to IndexNow the moment you hit publish.

Crawl settings worth knowing

The defaults are sensible, but a few options change the outcome significantly.

• Respect robots.txt is on by default and should usually stay on. It keeps the sitemap consistent with what you are already telling crawlers.
• Skip pages marked noindex prevents the contradiction of listing a page in your sitemap while telling search engines to ignore it.
• Ignore URL query strings treats /page/?utm_source=x as /page/, which stops tracking parameters creating dozens of duplicates.
• Priority and change frequency are left out by default because Google has said it ignores both. They are available for the systems that still read them.
• Exclusions take one fragment per line. /tag/ and /author/ are common candidates on a blog.

If your site is larger than the page limit, raise it in the options or crawl in sections by entering a subfolder address such as https://example.com/blog/. You can also switch to the “Paste a URL list” tab and supply URLs from your own export, which skips crawling entirely.