XML Sitemap Generator

What is an XML Sitemap?

XML sitemap is a file containing a list of the pages of your website in a structured format that is machine-readable, enabling search engines to find and crawl your website more effectively. Specifically for crawlers and not visitors, written in the Sitemaps XML format which is a simple standard adopted by Google, Bing and pretty much every other search engine.

A sitemap will not guarantee a page will be indexed and will not directly impact rankings. It actually does is assist search engines to locate pages quicker and more fully, particularly for:

• New sites that have no or a few inbound links to them.
• Large websites that have some pages deep in the navigation tree, and might otherwise take longer to find.
• Pages that don't have strong internal links, either orphaned pages or content only accessible via search or filters
• Up-to-date information -- news sites, e-commerce catalogs, blogs that publish frequently

To create an XML Sitemap (3 steps):

1. Add your URLs. Type them in, paste a bulk list (one per line), upload a text file or let the tool crawl your site automatically and grab them for you.
2. Set optional metadata. If you wish to add a last-modified date, change frequency, or priority per URL, do so (see below if you think it's necessary).
3. Generate and download. Download a pre-made sitemap.xml, and upload it to the root directory of your site, which you can then submit via Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

What a valid Sitemap is, in actuality.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-07-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-06-15</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Only the URL <loc> is needed. All other metadata is optional.

Are do changefreq and priority really useful?

This is something you should be honest about, since most generators allow you to set these values and don't mention that they have a lesser effect in the real world.

• A number between 0 and 1 that you have assigned to a page, relative to the rest of your site, to mark its importance. Google has said that it does not pay much attention to this area because it's easy for site owners to claim every page as 1.0 and so the signal loses meaning at scale.
• <changefreq> defines the frequency at which the content on a page changes (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). This is more of a suggestion than a designator to search engines; search engines calculate the frequency of crawling based on the changes observed over time.
• The one metadata element that has proven actually useful is the <lastmod> element — if the date is correct, a search engine will remember that a page has truly been modified and thus will focus more on it when re-crawling. It is possible to lower the search engines' trust for the field over time with an incorrect or artificially modified lastmod (bumping the date of every page on each deploy, regardless of whether there has been content changes)

So, you won't be penalized for filling them out, but you also won't find much benefit in optimizing these settings, in terms of better rankings — a well-curated, accurate list of URLs (wherever possible, with lastmod dates) is much more important.

The size limits for sitemaps and sitemap index files.

The number of urls in a single sitemap.xml is limited to 50,000 and the total uncompressed size of the sitemap.xml is limited to 50 MB. If your site contains more pages, you should have a sitemap index file (a sitemap containing more than one sitemap file – and each containing more than one URL):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-pages.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml</loc>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

This is standard practice with large ecommerce websites and publishers — having multiple sitemaps by type (pages, blog posts, products, images) allows you to easily see if there are any indexing problems in a certain subset of your site without wading through a long sitemap.

XML Sitemap vs HTML Sitemap.

These are used to solve different problems and it is important not to mix them up:

• XML sitemap — created for search engine robots, provides a structured list of URLs, can be found at a predictable location (e.g. /sitemap.xml), is not intended to be viewed by users.
• HTML sitemap — a common web page made for human users normally a simple linked checklist of the primary areas of the website, useful for site navigation, as well as a backup when a user cannot find what they are searching for using normal web navigation.

Most sites will want to have both, but they cater to different audiences: an XML sitemap for search engines, and an HTML sitemap for real people.

Frequently Asked Questions