XML Sitemap

A structured XML file listing your site's important URLs to help search engines discover and crawl them efficiently.

An XML sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and referenced in robots.txt via the Sitemap: directive. It acts as a roadmap of your site's most important content, helping crawlers discover pages they might miss through normal link-following — particularly important for large sites, new sites with few inbound links, and pages deep in the site architecture.

Each <url> entry can include: <loc> (required URL), <lastmod> (last modified date), <changefreq> (how often content changes), and <priority> (0.0–1.0, relative importance). However, Google has stated it largely ignores changefreq and priority values. The <lastmod> date is used and should be accurate — Google trusts it when deciding whether to recrawl.

Sitemap best practices: only include canonical URLs you want indexed (no paginated versions unless using proper pagination markup), keep each file under 50,000 URLs or 50MB, use sitemap indexes for large sites, and separate sitemaps by content type (posts, products, images, videos).