What is a Sitemap?

When your site needs a sitemap

If your site has about 500 pages or fewer and every page can be reached by following links from your homepage, you probably don't need a sitemap. That threshold comes straight from Google's Search Console documentation. A sitemap matters most when those conditions fail: on a large site, a site whose pages aren't well linked, or a new site that few external links point to yet, crawlers have fewer paths to discover your pages. A sitemap can also carry extra details about video, image, and news content, such as a video's running time or an article's publication date.

Most owners should publish one anyway: it costs nothing, and if you run a CMS, you probably have an XML sitemap already.

Sitemap file formats vs. HTML sitemaps

Google supports the sitemap file formats defined by the sitemaps protocol: XML, RSS and Atom feeds, and plain text. It has no preference among them. An HTML sitemap isn't one of these formats; it's an ordinary linked page for visitors. Here's what each one is for:

• XML sitemap: a machine-readable file built for crawlers. It's the most versatile format: it's extensible, so it can also describe image, video, and news content, and it's the one most CMSs and SEO plugins generate automatically.
• RSS, Atom, and plain text: Google also accepts RSS and Atom feeds and simple text files of URLs as sitemap files. They're easy to produce but carry less information than XML.
• HTML sitemap: an ordinary web page of links that helps human visitors find their way around a large site. It primarily aids visitor navigation, but its links can also help crawlers discover pages. You can't submit it as an XML sitemap.

For almost every site, XML is the right choice.

How to create and submit a sitemap

To put a sitemap to work, check whether one already exists, generate the file if it doesn't, and then tell search engines where it lives.

1. Check for an existing sitemap. WordPress has generated one automatically since version 5.5 in 2020: it's published at yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml and referenced in the site's robots.txt file. SEO plugins and most other CMSs create their own, so many site owners need to build nothing.
2. Generate the file if you need to. A sitemap generator or SEO plugin handles this for you; for a small hand-built site, you can write the XML yourself. Our guide to XML sitemaps walks through both approaches.
3. Tell search engines where it lives. Submit the sitemap's URL in Google Search Console's Sitemaps report, or add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt file, which lets Google, Bing, and other crawlers that support the Sitemap directive find it without an account.

A hint, not a guarantee

Submitting or updating a sitemap helps Google recrawl the file sooner, but a sitemap is a hint, not a command. The protocol defines its fields that way, and Google may still skip some listed URLs when it crawls your site. Whether a page gets indexed depends on its quality, its links, and whether crawlers can reach it. If an important page stays out of the index, fix the page itself; resubmitting the sitemap won't force it in.