Sitemap Generator

A sitemap is a file that lists the important pages on your website, helping search engines discover and understand your content. While not mandatory, sitemaps significantly speed up indexing for new sites, large websites with deep page structures, and pages that aren't well-linked internally. They also let you communicate metadata like update frequency and relative priority to crawlers.

Use XML for standard search engine submission through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools—this is the recommended format with full metadata support. Choose TXT when you only need a simple URL list to reference in robots.txt. Select CSV if you're creating documentation or need to share URL data with team members in spreadsheet form.

Download your XML sitemap file, then: (1) Sign into Google Search Console, (2) Select your property, (3) Navigate to "Sitemaps" in the left menu, (4) Enter your sitemap URL (e.g., https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and click Submit. Google typically processes sitemaps within a few days, though crawling priority isn't guaranteed.

Priority (0.0 to 1.0) suggests the relative importance of URLs within your own site—not compared to other websites. Google treats this as a hint, not a command. Use 1.0 for your homepage and critical landing pages, 0.5 for standard content, and lower values for archives or less important pages. All priorities on a site should not total more than 1.0 conceptually, though this isn't strictly enforced.

changefreq predicts how often content typically changes (daily, weekly, etc.), while lastmod records the actual date of last significant modification. Search engines prefer lastmod when accurate—it's more reliable than scheduled assumptions. Use both: lastmod for precise signals, changefreq as a fallback expectation.

Common validation failures include: missing protocol (we auto-fix to https://), malformed domain names, URLs exceeding 2048 characters, or duplicate entries. Check the error panel for specific line numbers. The tool attempts smart extraction from pasted formats, but heavily malformed source text may need manual cleanup.

The sitemap protocol limits single files to 50,000 URLs. For larger sites, create multiple sitemaps and submit a sitemap index file that references them. This tool warns when approaching limits; you'll need to split input manually and generate separate files, then combine them with an index wrapper.

Enabling the image namespace adds xmlns:image to your XML, allowing manual inclusion of image metadata per URL. This helps Google Images discover your visual content. Note: this tool enables the namespace only—you'd extend individual URLs with <image:image> tags manually or via API for full image sitemap implementation.

Enable hreflang support only if your site has language or regional variants (e.g., /en/ and /es/ versions of the same page). This adds the xmlns:xhtml namespace for alternate link annotations. Without actual hreflang tags in your source code pointing between variants, enabling this has no benefit.

No—this is a generator, not a crawler. You must provide the URLs yourself by pasting them. For automatic crawling and sitemap discovery, use dedicated SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or cloud-based crawlers. This tool excels when you have a known list of URLs from CMS exports, analytics, or manual compilation.

Update whenever you publish significant new content, remove pages, or change URL structures. For actively maintained sites, weekly or monthly regeneration is typical. Automated systems often regenerate sitemaps on each build; manual users should refresh before major SEO campaigns or after content migrations.

Technically yes, but search engines generally reject cross-domain sitemaps unless you verify ownership of all domains in Search Console. Each domain should typically have its own sitemap. Subdomains (blog.example.com vs www.example.com) can be combined but are treated separately by search engines unless properly canonicalized.

lastmod helps search engines identify fresh content for recrawling. Accurate dates improve crawl efficiency—Google may prioritize pages showing recent updates. Avoid fake recent dates; they don't improve rankings and may reduce trust signals. The tool can auto-populate today's date or let you set custom revision dates.

Yes—uncompressed sitemaps must stay under 50MB. The tool estimates your output size and warns if approaching this limit. Compress large sitemaps with gzip (acceptable to search engines) or split into multiple files referenced by a sitemap index.