Free Sitemap.xml Generator

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sitemap.xml

Nothing you type here is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere. It all runs in your browser.

What belongs in a sitemap

Only canonical, indexable, 200-returning URLs. No redirects, no noindex pages, no 404s. A sitemap full of junk teaches Google to distrust it.
Changefreq and priority are largely ignored. Google has said so repeatedly. lastmod is the one it actually uses — and only if it is honest.
50,000 URLs or 50MB per file. Past that, split it and use a sitemap index.
Reference it from robots.txt and submit it in Search Console.

If your pages come from a database, generate the sitemap dynamically instead. A hand-maintained file drifts, and dead URLs in a sitemap are a bad look on any site — worse on an SEO one.

Questions people ask

I submitted a sitemap and my pages still are not indexed. What went wrong?

Probably nothing. A sitemap is a discovery aid, not an indexing request — it tells Google the URL exists, and Google still decides independently whether the page is worth keeping. Pages that sit unindexed after discovery almost always have the same problem: nothing links to them and there is nothing on them that another page does not already say.

Do I need a sitemap for a small site?

Under a few hundred well-linked pages it adds very little to discovery. Submit one anyway, because Search Console reports coverage per sitemap — that turns "some pages are not indexed" into a list you can act on, which is worth the five minutes on its own.

What date should lastmod be?

The date the content meaningfully changed. Not the build timestamp, not the date you swapped a footer link. Google uses lastmod when it is consistently honest and ignores the field entirely once it is not — and a sitemap where every URL changed at 03:00 this morning is the fastest way to teach it to ignore yours.

Do I have to resubmit the sitemap after I update it?

No. Google refetches submitted sitemaps on its own schedule. The old ping endpoint was retired in 2023, so any script you inherited that calls it is hitting a deprecated URL and doing nothing.

Should paginated or filtered URLs go in?

Only the ones that are canonical and worth a searcher landing on. Page 2 of a listing usually qualifies; every combination of colour and size filter does not. The test is simple — if you would not want that URL to be the one ranking, it does not belong in the file.

Sitemap.xml Generator