A well-optimised sitemap is a crucial component of any successful WordPress site. It not only ensures that search engines can easily index your content but also enhances user experience by providing a clear and organised structure of your website. In the dynamic digital landscape, where visibility and accessibility are key, understanding how to optimize your WordPress sitemap can significantly impact your site’s search engine ranking and overall performance.

This article will guide you through the essential steps and best practices to optimise your WordPress sitemap, helping you boost your SEO efforts and make your content more discoverable.

What is a Sitemap and Why Do You Need One?

A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website, providing a roadmap for search engines like Google to crawl and index your content efficiently. There are two primary types of sitemaps: XML sitemaps, designed specifically for search engines, and HTML sitemaps, which are more user-friendly and intended for visitors. XML sitemaps contain metadata about each URL, such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and its relative importance within the site.

Having a sitemap is essential for several reasons:

• Improved Search Engine Indexing: Sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website, ensuring that all your important pages are indexed. This is particularly beneficial for large websites with complex structures, new websites with few external links, or websites with rich media content.

• Enhanced SEO Performance: By providing search engines with a clear map of your site, you improve your chances of ranking higher in search results. Sitemaps also allow you to highlight the most important pages and indicate when content has been updated, which can lead to better search visibility.

• Better User Experience: An HTML sitemap can help visitors navigate your site more easily, especially if it has a lot of content. It acts as a directory, allowing users to find the information they need without having to search through multiple pages.

• Prioritising Content: Sitemaps enable you to prioritise which pages are more important. By doing so, you can guide search engines to focus on indexing the most crucial content, improving the overall efficiency of the indexing process.

Types of Sitemaps

While a standard XML sitemap is sufficient for most websites, other specialised sitemap types serve different purposes:

• Video Sitemaps: A video sitemap allows you to list video content on your site for better indexing by search engines like Google. The video sitemap XML contains data like titles, descriptions, durations and thumbnails. According to recent data from BrightEdge, pages with video content tend to rank higher in Google.

• News Sitemaps: A Google News sitemap helps news sites include their content in Google News search results. It uses RSS/Atom feeds to list news articles and contains publication date, keywords, geospatial data, etc. News results get around 10% of search clicks, according to Jumpshot data.

• Image Sitemaps: An image sitemap specifies image content like photos and graphics on a site for image search indexing. The XML includes image location, captions, licenses and more. Image SEO can drive significant traffic, with Google Images driving over one billion monthly visits.

• Mobile Sitemaps: A mobile sitemap helps identify site content optimised for mobile devices. This allows search engines to prioritise mobile-friendly pages. According to Google, over 60% of searches now happen on mobile devices.

• Multilingual/Multi-regional Sitemaps: Used to target searchers in different languages and regions. The sitemap XML identifies the language and geo-target for each URL. Catering to local audiences can boost international growth and sales.

• HTML Sitemaps: An HTML sitemap helps improve internal navigation for users. It contains links to key site pages and categories in a visual format. This enhances user experience and site architecture.

We recommend using the XML sitemap types that are most relevant to your content and audience. The key is optimising for search engines as well as users.

How to Create a WordPress Sitemap   

There are various tools that you can use to create a sitemap. On WordPress, the easiest way to do that is to utilise a plugin, which we will discuss more below. To check if your website has an existing sitemap, you can use the following web address: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. It’s important for you to understand that a sitemap must be updated every time a page is updated or a new page is added.

If you don’t have a WordPress website, you’ll need alternative options for creating a sitemap. You can do a search on Google for plugins that are made to be used with your specific CMS platform.

Sitemap Plugins

Here are some of the top sitemap plugins for WordPress:

• Google XML Sitemaps: A popular free plugin that handles all types of XML sitemaps. Easy to set up and customise.

• SEOPress: All-in-one SEO plugin with a built-in sitemap generator with nice controls. The paid “Pro” version is available.

• Yoast SEO: Robust SEO plugin that includes XML sitemap functionality. The paid premium version unlocks more features.

• All-in-One SEO: Integrates sitemap building along with other SEO tools. The basic version is free.

• Google XML Sitemaps Premium: Adds functionality like auto submit pings and indexing stats to the base Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

When choosing a sitemap plugin, look for ones that allow easy customisation of parameters, automated updates, integration with other SEO tools, and those with ongoing support/updates from the developer.

In the following sections, we are precisely discussing the two most popular and widely-used plugins of Google Sitemap Generator and Yoast SEO. We will cover detailed instructions on generating your sitemap using these plugins below.

Creating a WordPress Sitemap

Creating a sitemap for a WordPress website is pretty straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process using Google Sitemap Generator and Yoast SEO.

Using Google Sitemap Generator

1. Download the plugin and install it into your WordPress website then activate it.
2. Go to settings and click ‘XML-Sitemap’.
3. Go to Sitemap Content and put in what pages you’re excluding.
4. Click on ‘last modification time’ so that it is selected.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page and select ‘Update Options

You should then go into your sitemap URL and verify that your changes have been made.

Using Yoast SEO Plugin

1. Download the plugin and install it into your WordPress website. Activate.
2. Go to SEO and click on ‘XML Sitemaps’.
3. Click on ‘Enable XML Sitemap Functionality’ so that it is selected.
4. Go to ‘Post Types’ and input the posts you want to exclude, such as media pages, etc.
5. Go to ‘Taxonomies’ and input the tags and categories you want to exclude from the sitemap.
6. Go to the ‘General’ tab and save your new settings by clicking ‘Save settings’.

Once that is done, go to your sitemap URL and verify that your changes have been made.

Optimising a WordPress Sitemap

While you can generate a sitemap that includes all of your web pages, blog posts, archived pages, images, videos, it’s important to optimise this sitemap by including the most vital pages and excluding those that won’t do you any good on the search engine results page. Here are some rules to remember when optimising your WordPress sitemap:

Include

• Important pages include the Home page, About Us page, blog posts and articles, etc.
• Pages that have high-quality content.

Exclude

• Pages with duplicate content, such as archived web pages, tag pages, and author pages.
• Pages that are low quality, in other words, have very little content.
• Pages that are blocked by robots
• Pages that are password-protected

The best way to exclude the “bad” pages from your sitemap is to ‘no-index’ each page. You can also add them to a specific category and then exclude the category from your sitemap. If you generate a sitemap with sub-sitemaps, as suggested above, it will be easier to control what is included and excluded.

Always remember that it’s about quality, not quantity. It’s not important to have a lot of pages listed; it’s more important that the indexed pages have quality content.

Submitting a WordPress Sitemap

The next step of creating a WordPress website sitemap is submission. This means providing search engines with the sitemap you just created, which lists all the pages on your website you want to index. This helps search engines understand your site’s structure and ensures all important pages are indexed efficiently.

Here is how to submit your sitemap:

• Search Console: Add your sitemap URL in the “Index” section of Google Search Console. This pings Google for fresh indexing whenever updated.
• Sitemap Index: For large sites, split your sitemap into multiple files and add a sitemap index file to list all the separate sitemaps.
• Robots.txt: Include sitemap and sitemap index locations in your root robots.txt file for crawler access by adding http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml at the top of your robots.txt.
• Manual Submission: Manually submit the sitemap URL through Google Search Console’s “Submit URL” feature. This can help speed up initial indexing.
• Site Crawling: Use site crawl tools like DeepCrawl to identify and fix crawl errors on your site. This improves accessibility.
• 301 Redirects: Redirect outdated sitemap URLs to the current version to avoid indexing issues.
• Ping Services: Use paid sitemap ping services like XML-Sitemaps to submit your sitemap to search engines for faster indexing.

Sitemap Submission to Google

To submit your sitemap to Google, you’ll need to have a Google Search Central (formerly Webmasters) account. The account is free, and if you’ve already had your Google Analytics set up, it will take just a few clicks. Once you have logged into your Google Webmaster account, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Go to ‘Crawl’ and select ‘Sitemaps’.
2. Click on ‘Add/Test Sitemap’, which is located on the top right of that page.
3. Input your sitemap filename. Your filename will be the section after http://www.yourdomain.com, most likely ‘sitemap.xml’.
4. Click ‘Submit Sitemap’

Once you’ve submitted your sitemap, it will appear as Pending. In a few days, you must log back into Webmasters and verify how many pages are now indexed. Google normally won’t index all of your web pages immediately, so check in every week or so to see the progress and remember to update your sitemap every time you add a new page or update an existing page.

Sitemap Submission to Bing

While Google is the dominant search engine, there are a lot of people who still use Bing for their searches. To submit your sitemap to Bing, you’ll need to register for Bing Webmasters tools. It’s free, just like Google’s platform, and they provide detailed instructions for connecting to your website.

To submit your sitemap to Bing, log into your Bing Webmaster Tools account and do the following:

1. Find the ‘Sitemaps’ widget.
2. Click ‘Submit a Sitemap’
3. Enter your sitemap URL in the text box.
4. Click ‘Submit’

Once you’ve submitted your sitemap, it will be also listed as Pending. Just like Google Search Central, Bing will begin listing the indexed page on their platform, and you can check in every few weeks to see the progress. If there are any issues, you’ll see an exclamation mark, and when you hover over it, it will tell you what the issue is and whether or not you need to upload a new sitemap

Managing a WordPress Sitemap

Effectively managing your sitemap involves several key tasks to ensure your website is accurately represented to search engines. Here’s a guide to help you manage your sitemap:

• Keep it Updated: Re-generate your sitemap frequently as you add new content. Search engines favour fresh, quality content.
• Include Images: Make sure your sitemap references any media on your site using the image: image tag.
• Video Sitemap: Add a separate sitemap for video content, especially if you have a site focused on video.
• Limit by Location: If targeting local SEO, you can geo-tag URLs in your sitemap by region.
• Customise Image Data: Optimise image titles, captions and alt text referenced in the sitemap for better image rankings.
• Detail Level: Strike a balance between detail and file size. No need to over-bloat your sitemap.
• No Duplicate Content: Avoid listing the same content multiple times across different sitemaps.
• Page Speed: Exclude heavy pages from your sitemap if it slows load time and affects crawling.
• Indexing API: Use Google’s Indexing API for real-time URL additions without having to re-submit an updated sitemap.

Keep in mind that if you add new pages to your website and forget to update the sitemap, your pages may take a lot longer to index on the search engines.

Here are some other tips to better manage your sitemap:

• Consider generating separate sitemaps for each content type or category on your site to allow more granular indexing. For example, separate sitemaps for blog posts, services pages, location pages, etc.
• When hosting sitemaps on your site, use a trailing slash sitemap.xml/ not sitemap.xml to avoid duplication issues.
• After making major site structure changes or migrations, re-generate your sitemaps from scratch instead of incrementally updating them to avoid indexing errors.
• Monitor your sitemap Indexing status within Google Search Console to identify crawl errors and diagnose indexing issues.
• When updating your sitemap with new URLs, ping services are less important since search engines will recrawl frequently anyway.
• Balance your sitemap content between the most important pages you want to be indexed, but also include deeper linked pages that search engines may struggle to discover on their own.
• For multilingual sites, create a separate sitemap for each language and indicate the language within each URL node.

Troubleshooting a WordPress Sitemap

If you’re having problems with your WordPress sitemap, there are a few things you can check:

• Make sure the sitemap is accessible: Search engines need to be able to access your sitemap to crawl and index your pages. Check to make sure that the sitemap file is located in the root directory of your website and that it is not blocked by robots.txt.
• Fix any broken links: If your sitemap contains any broken links, search engines will not be able to crawl and index your pages properly. Use a broken link checker to find and fix any broken links in your sitemap.
• Remove excluded pages: If you’ve excluded any pages from your sitemap, make sure that you’re not linking to them from other pages on your website. Otherwise, search engines will still try to crawl and index these pages.
• Update the sitemap regularly. If your website changes frequently, make sure to update your sitemap regularly. This will ensure that search engines are always aware of all of your pages.

Conclusion

Optimising your WordPress sitemap is a crucial aspect of enhancing your website’s SEO and overall performance. By focusing on creating a comprehensive and organised sitemap, you ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your content, leading to better search engine rankings and increased visibility. Regularly updating your sitemap, excluding unnecessary pages, and utilising advanced features of sitemap plugins can further refine your optimisation efforts.

Ultimately, a well-optimised sitemap not only benefits search engines but also improves user experience by making your site easier to navigate. Invest the time and effort in optimising your WordPress sitemap, and you’ll pave the way for a more discoverable and user-friendly website.

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