XML Sitemap Generator

How to Use

• Enter the canonical site URL and sitemap rows. Paste the public site URL first, then add one URL row per line in the main sitemap field. A row can be just a path like /pricing/, or a richer format like /pricing/|2026-03-09|weekly|0.8.
• Choose how URLs should be normalized. Decide whether query strings and fragments should be stripped, because production sitemaps usually point only to clean canonical URLs.
• Add optional image or hreflang data. Include image rows for important media pages and hreflang rows only when the listed pages are true language or regional equivalents.
• Generate, review, and publish carefully. Build the XML output, read the diagnostics, and publish only after confirming that every URL is canonical, indexable, and aligned with the version you submit to webmaster tools.

What Belongs in a Sitemap and What Usually Does Not

Practical Tips for Better Crawl Coverage

For small brochure sites, one sitemap file is often enough, and the biggest win is simply making sure the file points to clean canonical URLs. For ecommerce sites, it is common to split sitemaps by content type, such as products, categories, blog content, or image-heavy landing pages. For publishers or SaaS documentation sites, lastmod becomes more useful because content freshness changes crawl behavior more often than on static marketing pages.

If a site grows quickly, do not wait until the sitemap breaks. Once you approach the 50,000-URL or 50 MB uncompressed limit, move to multiple sitemap files and a sitemap index. That makes crawling more predictable and gives teams cleaner ownership boundaries, for example one sitemap for docs, one for marketing pages, and one for product catalog URLs.

Common Mistakes That Hurt Sitemap Quality

A frequent mistake is exporting every URL known to the CMS, even if some pages redirect, are canonicalized elsewhere, or were intentionally marked noindex. Another is leaving marketing parameters, internal search queries, or fragment identifiers in the file. Multilingual teams also commonly overstate hreflang coverage by listing alternates that are only partially translated or structurally different pages. In all of these cases, the sitemap becomes less reliable as a source of crawl guidance.

The goal is not completeness at any cost. The goal is clarity. Search engines already discover a large amount of URL noise on their own. Your sitemap should help them ignore that noise and focus on the URLs that deserve crawl budget and index attention.