How to Create an XML Sitemap for Your Website

What an XML Sitemap Is For

A sitemap is a machine-readable list of URLs you'd like search engines to crawl. It helps them discover pages, especially on new sites with few external links, large sites, or pages that aren't well linked internally. It doesn't guarantee indexing or improve rankings by itself. Search engines still decide what to crawl and index based on quality, canonicalisation and many other signals.

The Basic Format

A minimal sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-07</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/tools/json-to-excel-converter</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

Key rules from the sitemap protocol:

• The file must be UTF-8 encoded.
• Each <loc> must be an absolute URL, including https://.
• Special characters such as & must be escaped (&).
• A single sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites split URLs across several sitemaps listed in a sitemap index file.
• <lastmod> is optional; Google says it uses it when it's consistently accurate. <priority> and <changefreq> are also defined by the protocol, but Google ignores them.

What to Include (and Leave Out)

Include:

• Pages you want to appear in search results
• The canonical version of each URL (one per page)
• URLs that return HTTP 200

Leave out:

• Redirecting URLs, 404s and error pages
• Pages marked noindex
• Duplicate URLs with tracking parameters, session IDs or sort orders
• Pages blocked by robots.txt
• Login, cart and internal search results pages

A clean sitemap is a strong signal of what you consider important. XML sitemap best practices covers these choices in more detail.

Method 1: Use Your CMS or Framework

Check whether you already have a sitemap before making another one:

• WordPress generates /wp-sitemap.xml by default, and SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math replace it with their own.
• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace create sitemaps automatically.
• Frameworks such as Next.js can generate a sitemap from code, so it updates with every deployment.

Try visiting /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml and /wp-sitemap.xml on your domain, and look for a Sitemap: line in /robots.txt. An automatically maintained sitemap is almost always better than a static file you have to remember to regenerate.

Method 2: Crawl Your Site With a Generator

If your platform doesn't produce a sitemap, a crawler can build one by following your internal links. The XML sitemap generator crawls a public website from its home page:

1. Enter your site's URL and start the crawl.
2. The crawler follows links on the same host, respects robots.txt, and skips non-HTML resources.
3. Review the discovered URLs. Remove anything that shouldn't be there, such as filtered or duplicate pages.
4. Download sitemap.xml. Large lists are split into multiple files with an index.

Each crawl covers up to 1,000 pages. Pages that nothing links to can't be found by crawling, which is a good reason to also check your internal linking.

Method 3: Build It From a List of URLs

If you already know your URLs, for example from a CMS export, analytics or a spreadsheet, use the generator's Paste URLs mode. Paste the addresses or upload a TXT or CSV file; the tool validates them, removes duplicates and builds the XML in your browser without crawling anything.

Publish the File

1. Upload sitemap.xml to your site's root, so it's available at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. A sitemap can only list URLs at or below its own location, so the root is the safest place.
2. Open the URL in a browser to confirm it loads and returns the XML.
3. Add a line to robots.txt:

Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

1. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. How to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console walks through that.

Summary

Use your CMS's sitemap if it has one. Otherwise, crawl your site or paste a URL list into a generator, include only canonical, indexable 200-status pages, publish at the root and submit it to search engines.