A sitemap tells search engines which pages of your site exist and when they changed, so new content gets found sooner. For a small site you do not need a plugin or a crawler to make one: paste the addresses, and this generator writes a correct sitemap.xml with the standard namespace, escaped special characters and the optional fields you choose.
Build the sitemap in three steps
- Paste your page addresses, one full URL per line. Commas and spaces also separate them.
- Set a last-modified date if you want one, a change frequency and a priority. All three are optional and apply to every URL.
- Press Copy or Download sitemap.xml and upload the file to the root of your site.
What the checks do
- Entries that are not full http or https URLs are skipped and counted, with the first one shown so you can fix it.
- Repeated URLs are removed so that each page appears once.
- Characters such as & in a query string are escaped, which is required in XML.
- The limit of 50,000 URLs per file is enforced, and you are told when you go over it.
Telling search engines about it
Put the finished file at the top level of your domain, for example https://example.com/sitemap.xml. Then add a Sitemap line to your robots.txt, or submit the address in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The robots.txt generator on this site can add that line for you.
Which fields matter
The only required field is the address of each page. Google uses the last-modified date when it is accurate and ignores priority and change frequency, so do not spend time tuning them. If you set a date, make sure it is the date the page really changed, not the date you built the file. Pages that are blocked in robots.txt or redirect elsewhere should not be listed.