Free OnlineXML Sitemap Generatorfor Any Website

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file, usually named sitemap.xml, that lists the URLs on your website you want search engines to know about. Each entry can carry a last-modified date and optional hints like change frequency and priority. It lives at your site root and acts as a roadmap that helps Google, Bing, and other engines discover and prioritise your pages — especially ones that are new or weakly linked.

For a five-page brochure site with good internal links, crawlers will find everything anyway. For anything larger — blogs, stores, sites with deep sections, new sites with few backlinks, or sites recovering from a migration — a sitemap measurably speeds up discovery and gives Search Console a baseline to report indexing coverage against. It costs nothing to have and is considered standard technical SEO.

An XML sitemap is for machines: a structured file crawlers read to discover URLs. An HTML sitemap is a normal web page listing links for human visitors. They serve different purposes — the XML file is the one you submit to Google Search Console, while an HTML sitemap is optional navigation help. Modern sites almost always need the XML version; the HTML version is a nice-to-have.

Upload it to your website's root directory so it resolves at https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Crawlers and Search Console conventionally look there, and a root-level sitemap may reference URLs anywhere on the host. If your CMS generates one automatically at a different path, that is fine too — just submit the actual URL to Search Console and reference it in robots.txt.

In Google Search Console, open your property, go to Indexing > Sitemaps, enter the sitemap URL, and press Submit. Google then fetches it periodically and reports discovered, indexed, and excluded URLs. Also add a Sitemap: line with the absolute URL to your robots.txt so every other crawler finds it automatically.

Honestly: barely. Google has publicly said it ignores <priority>, and Bing gives it minimal weight at most. It does not boost rankings. What genuinely matters is that your <loc> URLs are canonical and crawlable and your <lastmod> dates are accurate. This generator includes priority because the sitemap spec defines it and some crawlers read it, but the toggle lets you omit it entirely — a perfectly good choice.

<changefreq> hints how often a page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. Like priority, Google ignores it — crawl frequency is decided from observed change patterns, not your hint. If you set it, be roughly honest (a static about page is not 'hourly'), or simply omit the tag using the toggle in this tool.

The date the page content last meaningfully changed, in W3C format — YYYY-MM-DD is enough. Google does use lastmod when it is consistently accurate, making it the one optional tag genuinely worth maintaining. Do not bulk-set every URL to today's date to look fresh: engines detect that pattern and learn to distrust your lastmod entirely.

The sitemap protocol allows up to 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed per file. Beyond either limit you must split into multiple sitemaps referenced by a sitemap index file. This generator shows a live URL count and byte size, warns as you approach the limits, and tells you when an index is needed.

A sitemap index is a sitemap of sitemaps: an XML file using <sitemapindex> that lists the URLs of multiple child sitemap files. Large sites split URLs across files — pages, posts, products — and submit only the index to Search Console. Each child file must itself respect the 50,000-URL / 50MB limits.

No. A sitemap should list only pages you want indexed — including a noindex, redirected, or 404 URL sends contradictory signals and shows up as errors and excluded pages in Search Console coverage reports. Include canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs only.

Add one line anywhere in the file: Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml — with the full absolute URL. You can list several sitemaps on separate lines. This is the standard way to advertise your sitemap to every crawler at once, and our free robots.txt generator adds the line for you.

Yes. WordPress core ships a basic sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml, and SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math replace it with a more configurable one at /sitemap_index.xml. If your plugin already maintains an accurate sitemap, you rarely need a manual one — this tool is most useful for static sites, custom builds, landing-page sets, or situations where you need precise control over exactly which URLs are listed.

Yes — the protocol has image and video extensions that attach <image:image> or <video:video> blocks to a URL entry, which helps media-heavy sites get pictures and videos indexed. This generator produces standard page sitemaps, which is what the vast majority of sites need; media extensions are a specialised addition your developer or SEO can layer on top.

Whenever your URL set changes: pages added, removed, or substantially updated. For hand-maintained sitemaps like the ones this tool produces, regenerate after each content change and re-upload. You do not need to resubmit in Search Console every time — Google re-fetches known sitemaps on its own — but resubmitting after a major overhaul or migration does no harm and can speed up re-crawling.