Sitemap


A Sitemap is a file that provides a structured overview of your website's content, helping search engines discover, crawl, and index your pages. The Sitemap's primary purpose is to notify search engines which pages on your site are most important.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use Sitemaps to efficiently find and index your website's content, improving your site's visibility in search results.

Creating a Sitemap

  • In the Site Editor, click Settings on the left sidebar:

  • Click the Search Engines > Sitemap.xml:

  • Published Website: The sitemap link will appear in the sidebar. Click it to open in a new tab or click the icon on the right to copy the link.

  • Unpublished Website: If the website is not published, you'll see a message indicating that a sitemap will be created upon publication.


Adding Your Sitemap to Google

Below are some of the benefits of adding a sitemap to Google:

  • Help search engines find your website - It can sometimes take search engines time to discover a new website. To speed up the process, you can submit a sitemap to search engines, which informs them of your website's existence and helps them find your website's URLs more quickly than they would otherwise. It is important to note that your sitemap should only include the URLs of content that you want to appear in search results. 
  • Provides search engines information about when your content was last updated - Search engines rely on the <lastmod> tag in the sitemap to detect any updates made to a URL since their previous visit. This information allows search engines to determine whether to recrawl the URL.
  • Enables search engines to locate orphaned content - Having isolated or unlinked posts, pages, taxonomies, or attachments may lead to orphaned content on your website. In such cases, search engines may be unable to discover this content without a sitemap.

How to Submit Your Sitemap.xml File through Google and Bing

Visit A Beginner's Guide to Navigating XML and HTML Sitemaps for detailed instructions on uploading a sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. To find information on how to troubleshoot errors when submitting a sitemap to Google, check out Google's documentation.