Sitemap Generator
Generate XML sitemaps
About Sitemap Generator
Sitemap Generator is a free online tool that creates a valid XML sitemap for your website. Enter your page URLs along with their last-modified dates, change frequencies, and priority values — the tool outputs a properly formatted sitemap.xml file ready to submit to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
An XML sitemap is a structured file that lists all the important pages on your website and provides metadata about each one — when it was last updated, how often it changes, and its relative priority. It is one of the most direct ways to communicate to search engines what content exists on your site, especially for pages that are not well linked internally and might otherwise take months to be discovered through regular crawling.
The Sitemap Protocol, supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines, uses a simple XML structure. Each URL entry is wrapped in a <url> tag and can include <loc> (the URL itself), <lastmod> (last modification date in YYYY-MM-DD format), <changefreq> (how often the page changes: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never), and <priority> (relative importance from 0.0 to 1.0, default 0.5). The maximum file size is 50 MB and the maximum number of URLs per sitemap is 50,000 — larger sites use sitemap index files.
Sitemaps are especially valuable for large sites, new sites with few inbound links, sites with rich media content like videos and images, and sites with pages that are not easily discoverable through internal links. For a small, well-linked site, a sitemap is still good practice but less critical. For an e-commerce site with thousands of product pages or a news site publishing daily, a sitemap is essential for timely indexing.
After generating your sitemap, place it at the root of your domain (yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), then submit it directly in Google Search Console under the Sitemaps section. Also reference it in your robots.txt file with the directive Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml so any crawler that reads robots.txt also discovers the sitemap automatically.
How to Use Sitemap Generator
- 1Enter each page URL you want to include in the sitemap
- 2Set the last modified date, change frequency, and priority for each URL
- 3Click "Generate Sitemap" to create the XML output
- 4Copy the XML and save it as sitemap.xml in your website root
- 5Submit the sitemap URL in Google Search Console under Sitemaps
Frequently Asked Questions
A sitemap is always beneficial, but it is most critical for large sites (100+ pages), new sites, or sites with poor internal linking. For a small, well-linked 10-page site, Google will likely crawl everything regardless.
Update your sitemap whenever you add, remove, or significantly update pages. Many CMS platforms like WordPress (with plugins like Yoast SEO) and Shopify generate and update sitemaps automatically.
Only include pages you want indexed. Exclude duplicate content pages, paginated archive pages, admin URLs, login pages, and any page with a noindex tag. A sitemap should represent your canonical, indexable content.
An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file for search engine crawlers. An HTML sitemap is a human-readable page listing your site's content for visitors. Both can help SEO — XML sitemaps help crawlers; HTML sitemaps help users navigate and pass internal link equity.
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