XMLSitemapCreator

How to create an XML sitemap (and submit it)

A sitemap won’t make a page rank, but a clean one helps search engines find new and changed pages quickly and gives you per-section indexing reports. Here is how to build one that does its job.

1. Decide what belongs in it

List the canonical, indexable URLs you want in search results — nothing else. Leave out:

  • URLs that redirect or return 4xx/5xx;
  • pages with noindex (meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header);
  • duplicates whose rel=canonical points to another URL — parameter variants, print views, tracking-tagged links;
  • URLs blocked by robots.txt (a sitemap listing them sends mixed signals);
  • internal search results, cart and account pages.

The creator’s crawler applies all of these rules and shows the reason for every exclusion.

2. Write the XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-10-30</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/pricing?plan=team&amp;cycle=yearly</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>
  • The file must be UTF-8 and the namespace exactly http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9.
  • <loc> is a full absolute URL, under 2,048 characters, with & written as &amp; and spaces or non-ASCII characters percent-encoded.
  • <lastmod> is optional and uses W3C Datetime: 2026-10-30 or 2026-10-30T14:05:00+05:30. A time without a timezone is invalid.
  • <changefreq> and <priority> are optional and ignored by Google. Skip them unless another consumer needs them.

3. Get lastmod right

Google uses lastmod as a crawl hint only when it has proven accurate for your site. Set it to the date the main content last changed — not the build date, not today’s date for every URL, and not when a sidebar widget updated. If you cannot produce real dates, leave lastmod out; a missing date is better than a misleading one. The validator warns when every URL carries the same date.

4. Mind the limits: split and index

One sitemap holds at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed (gzip is allowed for transfer). Larger sites split into several files and list them in a <sitemapindex>, which can reference up to 50,000 sitemaps. Splitting by section — pages, blog, products — also makes Search Console reports easier to read. The creator splits automatically; the splitter and index generator handle files you already have.

5. Add extensions where they help

  • Images — for product and gallery images, especially when loaded by script or from a CDN.
  • Video — thumbnail, title, description and a content or player URL are required.
  • News — articles from the last two days only, up to 1,000 per file.
  • Hreflang — language and regional versions, with every version listing every other, itself included.

6. Publish and submit

  1. Upload the file(s) to your site, normally the root: https://example.com/sitemap.xml. A sitemap can only list URLs at or below its own folder unless you submit it in Search Console.
  2. Add Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml to robots.txt (generator).
  3. Submit it in Google Search Console → Indexing → Sitemaps, and in Bing Webmaster Tools. Google retired the anonymous “ping” endpoint in 2023; resubmitting is unnecessary — Google re-reads sitemaps it knows about.
  4. Check the Page indexing report per sitemap after a few days. “Submitted URL not selected as canonical” or “Excluded by noindex” mean the sitemap lists URLs it shouldn’t.

Common mistakes

  • Unescaped & in URLs — the whole file fails to parse.
  • The https namespace (https://www.sitemaps.org/…) instead of http.
  • Listing http and https, or www and non-www, versions together.
  • Serving the sitemap behind a login, a redirect to the home page, or with an HTML error page and status 200.
  • Every URL stamped with the same lastmod.
  • Relative URLs such as /about.

Ready? Create your sitemap or check an existing one.