XML Sitemap Generator

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important URLs on your website so search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex can discover and crawl them efficiently. The sitemap protocol, defined at sitemaps.org (originally drafted by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft in 2006), supports metadata for each URL including the last modification date, change frequency, and relative priority. While search engines can find pages through links, a sitemap ensures that new, orphaned, or deep pages are not missed during crawling. This is especially important for large sites with thousands of pages, sites with complex navigation, sites that rely heavily on JavaScript routing, or newly launched domains with few inbound links.

This generator creates fully valid XML sitemaps that comply with the sitemap protocol specification. You can paste URLs directly, import them from a CSV file, or add them one at a time. Each URL can have individual priority (0.0 to 1.0), change frequency (always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never), and a last-modified date in W3C datetime format. If your site has more than 50,000 URLs or your sitemap exceeds 50 MB uncompressed, the tool automatically switches to sitemap index mode, splitting your URLs across multiple sitemap files with a master index file that references each one. Both Google and Bing accept either gzipped (.xml.gz) or plain sitemaps; for sites where bandwidth matters, gzip cuts the file size by roughly 80%.

Specialized sitemap variants. The base sitemap protocol covers HTML pages, but Google's sitemap extensions add structured metadata for image, video, and news content. An image sitemap tells Google which images on each page to include in Image Search results — useful for stock photo sites, recipe blogs, and visual portfolios where the image is the primary content. A video sitemap exposes a video's title, thumbnail, duration, and rating so it can show up as a rich result in regular search and in the Videos tab. News sitemaps are limited to articles published in the last 48 hours and are required for Google News inclusion. This tool focuses on the standard URL sitemap; for image, video, and news sitemaps we recommend Google's per-format reference pages and validating with their Search Console sitemap report.

Multilingual sitemaps and hreflang. If your site has multiple language versions of the same content, you can declare them in the sitemap using xhtml:link alternate annotations instead of (or alongside) on-page <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags. Sitemap-level hreflang scales better than HTML-level hreflang for sites with many languages because the entire mapping lives in one file rather than scattered across thousands of pages. Pair this with our Hreflang Tag Generator to validate the language and region codes (ISO 639-1 + ISO 3166-1) before adding them to the sitemap. Always include a self-referential alternate plus an x-default for users whose language isn't represented.

Validation, submission, and ongoing maintenance. A sitemap is only useful if search engines can find and parse it. Reference the sitemap in your robots.txt with a Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml directive (place it anywhere in the file), then submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. For faster discovery of new and updated URLs, use the IndexNow protocol (supported by Bing, Yandex, Naver, and Seznam) which pings search engines instantly instead of waiting for the next crawl. Common gotchas to avoid: never include URLs that return 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx status codes; never include canonicalized-away URLs (only the canonical version); never include URLs blocked by robots.txt or marked noindex; keep lastmod accurate (search engines down-weight sitemaps where every URL claims it was modified today). Pair with our Meta Tag Generator, Schema.org Generator, and SERP Preview for a complete on-page SEO setup.