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Sitemap Generator

Generate XML sitemaps online for better search engine indexing. Free sitemap generator with priority, frequency, and lastmod options.

Web & SEODeveloper Tools
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-05-11</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-05-11</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/contact</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-05-11</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Sitemap Best Practices:

  • Place sitemap.xml in your website root
  • Add sitemap URL to your robots.txt
  • Submit to Google Search Console
  • Keep URLs under 50,000 per sitemap
  • Update lastmod when content changes

About Sitemap Generator

Generate XML sitemaps to help search engines discover and index your website pages. Sitemaps include URL locations, last modification dates, change frequency, and priority information.

How to Use Sitemap Generator

1

Paste your URL list

Enter the URLs you want indexed, one per line. Stick to canonical URLs and skip anything that redirects, returns 404, or carries noindex.

2

Add metadata where it helps

Add lastmod for any URLs whose dates you actually know — that's the field modern search engines pay the most attention to. Changefreq and priority are optional and have a smaller effect.

3

Generate the XML

The tool produces a sitemap.xml that conforms to the sitemaps.org schema. Copy or download the result for upload.

4

Upload and submit

Save the file as sitemap.xml at your site root, add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt, and submit the URL through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for live status reporting.

When to Use Sitemap Generator

Helping search engines find every page

An XML sitemap is a manifest of the URLs you want indexed, including pages that might not be reachable through ordinary internal linking. On large or deep sites it's the difference between having content discovered quickly and having it sit unindexed for weeks. Generating a clean, standards-compliant sitemap.xml is one of the simplest technical SEO investments you can make.

Migrating domains or restructuring URLs

When you move a site or rework its URL scheme, sitemaps act as the source of truth for what should exist post-migration. Comparing the old and new files makes it easy to confirm that every page made the jump and that any redirects line up correctly. The fresh sitemap also signals the new layout to search engines so reindexing happens faster.

Organizing very large catalogs

Sites with tens of thousands of URLs hit the per-file limits and benefit from splitting content across multiple sitemaps held together by an index file. Separating products, blog posts, and category pages into their own sitemaps makes problems easier to diagnose and lets you push fresh URLs without re-uploading the entire manifest.

Specialized sitemaps for media

Beyond the generic format there are sitemap variants for News, Images, and Video that include type-specific metadata. They unlock dedicated search experiences such as Google News inclusion, image search visibility, and video thumbnails. Newsrooms and media-heavy sites get the most out of these specialized formats.

Sitemap Generator Examples

A typical sitemap entry

Input
https://example.com/page
Output
<url>\n  <loc>https://example.com/page</loc>\n  <lastmod>2024-03-15</lastmod>\n  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>\n  <priority>0.8</priority>\n</url>

The four fields cover everything Google currently pays attention to. lastmod tells the crawler when the page was last updated, changefreq is a soft hint about how often it changes, and priority signals relative importance on a 0.0–1.0 scale.

A sitemap index for a large site

Input
Multiple sub-sitemaps grouped under one index
Output
<sitemapindex>\n  <sitemap><loc>https://example.com/sitemap-products.xml</loc></sitemap>\n  <sitemap><loc>https://example.com/sitemap-blog.xml</loc></sitemap>\n</sitemapindex>

The index file points to other sitemaps rather than to URLs directly. This pattern is essential once a site exceeds the 50,000-URL ceiling per file or wants to update product and blog content independently.

Image entries on a sitemap URL

Input
A product page with multiple photos
Output
Each URL entry can carry one or more <image:image> children, each holding an <image:loc> for the image URL

Image sitemap entries make it easier for Google Images to discover and credit your visuals. The payoff is biggest for ecommerce catalogs and photography portfolios where image search is a meaningful traffic source.

Tips & Best Practices for Sitemap Generator

  • 1.Submit the finished sitemap directly through Google Search Console at search.google.com/search-console. Bing Webmaster Tools accepts the same file. Submission triggers a fetch and gives you live status reporting.
  • 2.Only include canonical URLs that you actually want indexed. Adding redirect targets, noindex pages, or 404s wastes crawl budget and can dilute the sitemap's signal.
  • 3.Keep lastmod values accurate. Search engines learn to ignore sitemaps that always claim recent updates, so churning the dates indiscriminately hurts more than it helps.
  • 4.For very large sitemaps, gzip is your friend. The 50,000-URL and 50MB-uncompressed (or 10MB compressed) limits mean splitting plus compression on big sites.
  • 5.Add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt as well. Crawlers picking up your robots file will follow the reference, even when they arrive without prior knowledge of the sitemap location.
  • 6.Reach for specialized formats when they fit. News, Image, and Video sitemaps add type-specific metadata that unlocks dedicated search treatments — generic sitemap.xml can't deliver those on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions

A sitemap is an XML file that lists the pages you want search engines to know about. The format was published by sitemaps.org in 2005 and is now supported by every major search engine. Its main job is to surface URLs that internal linking might miss.

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