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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteBefore using an online sitemap generator, check whether your website platform already creates a sitemap. If it does not, make a list of the canonical pages you want search engines to discover, generate a sitemap in a suitable format, publish it on your site, and submit or reference its URL. A sitemap can help search engines find URLs, but submitting one does not guarantee crawling or indexing.
Check whether your website already has a sitemap
Many content management systems (CMSs) automatically publish a sitemap. Check your platform’s settings or documentation first; adding a second sitemap generator may be unnecessary. Google’s sitemap guidance also suggests checking for CMS plugins if the built-in options do not meet your needs.
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If your site does not publish a sitemap, choose a format and creation method based on the number and type of URLs you need to include.
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Google supports XML, plain-text, RSS and Atom sitemaps, and says it has no preferred format. The right choice depends on whether you need a full inventory of pages, additional content details, or simply a feed your CMS already creates.
| Format | Best suited to | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| XML | A full URL inventory or supported details for images, video, news, and localized pages. | Flexible, but can be more cumbersome to maintain. |
| Plain text | A simple list of page URLs when no extra sitemap details are needed. | Limited to page URLs. |
| RSS or Atom | A CMS that already publishes a feed you can submit. | Feeds generally cover recent URLs rather than the full site. |
These format trade-offs are described in Google’s documentation. A feed may be convenient, but use a full sitemap if search engines need a complete URL inventory.
Create the sitemap
For a small site: make a list manually
For a site with fewer than a few dozen URLs, Google says you can create a sitemap manually. Include the absolute, canonical URLs of pages you want considered for search results—not every duplicate or alternate URL. Save the file in UTF-8 encoding.
A plain-text sitemap contains one fully qualified URL per line. For XML, the basic structure uses a urlset root, a url entry for each page, and a fully qualified loc value. XML values must be entity-escaped. Google’s documentation includes the format requirements and examples.
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For larger sites, generate the sitemap through your CMS, a suitable plugin, or site software that reads the site’s URL data or database. Automation helps keep the file aligned with page additions and removals; configure it to include only the canonical URLs you want search engines to consider.
Use dates only when they are accurate
An XML sitemap can include lastmod to state when a page was last significantly updated. Google may use this value when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. A minor change such as updating a copyright year does not count as a significant page update. Google ignores priority and changefreq, so do not add arbitrary values or expect them to improve rankings.
Keep within sitemap size limits
Google’s current guidance sets a limit of 50 MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs per sitemap. If your sitemap exceeds either limit, split the URLs into multiple sitemap files and list those files in a sitemap index. Google recommends placing a sitemap at the site root when practical. Without Search Console submission, its scope is limited to URLs beneath the parent directory where the sitemap is located.
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A sitemap index lists the locations of sitemap files and can include a lastmod value for each sitemap file. Google generally requires referenced sitemap files to be on the same site and in the same directory as the index or a lower directory, unless you configure cross-site submission. Google documents a limit of 500 sitemap index files per site in Search Console; its index-file guidance was last updated December 10, 2025. See Google’s sitemap index documentation for the rules.
Publish and submit the sitemap
- Upload or publish the file. Put it on your website, preferably at the root when practical. Confirm the sitemap URL loads and that the file contains the intended canonical URLs.
- Submit it to Google. In Google Search Console, use the Sitemaps report to submit the sitemap URL and check processing information. Google also supports submission through its Search Console API or a
Sitemapdirective inrobots.txt. The directive takes this form:Sitemap: https://example.com/my_sitemap.xml. See Google’s submission guidance. - Optionally submit it to Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools accepts XML, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3 and 1.0, and text sitemaps. Its sitemap view reports submission and processing information, including URLs discovered. Details are available in Bing’s sitemap documentation.
What to expect after submission
A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs; it does not make those pages eligible for indexing or ensure that they will appear in results. Google describes submission as a hint, not a guarantee that it will download or use the sitemap to crawl the listed URLs. Use Search Console’s processing information to identify errors, and make sure the sitemap remains accessible and accurate.
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