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Best practices for using sitemaps on your website
Table of Contents
What is a Sitemap? #
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all pages on your website, helping search engines discover and index your content.
Types of Sitemaps #
Standard Sitemap – Lists individual URLs in a single file
Sitemap Index – A master file that references multiple child sitemaps
Sitemap Indexes #
For large websites, a sitemap index file references multiple child sitemaps (e.g., post-sitemap.xml, page-sitemap.xml). This allows you to organize URLs across multiple files while keeping each file under size limits.
The Sitemap Checker automatically:
- Detects if your sitemap is an index or standard type
- For indexes, fetches and analyzes each child sitemap
- Counts all URLs across all child sitemaps (not just the index file)
- Shows detailed breakdown with URL counts and sizes per child
- Verifies accessibility of each child sitemap individually
Best practices #
- Declare sitemap location in robots.txt
- Update sitemap when content changes
- Include lastmod dates for all URLs (recommended but optional)
- Keep sitemap under 50MB and 50,000 URLs
- Use sitemap index for large sites
- Submit sitemap to Google Search Console
Note: Priority and changefreq are optional. Most modern SEO tools (Rank Math, Yoast, etc.) don’t include them, and search engines often ignore them anyway. Focus on keeping your sitemap accessible, valid, and up-to-date.