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Your sitemap

2 min readApplies to every PremiumPress theme · 12.x

Your sitemap

What a sitemap is, where to find yours, and how to give it to Google.

What a sitemap is​

A sitemap is a list of the pages on your site, written for search engines rather than people. It helps Google and Bing find your pages, including new ones, without waiting to stumble on a link to them.

WordPress makes it for you​

You do not need to create or update it. WordPress builds the sitemap automatically and keeps it up to date: when you publish a page, add a listing or create a category, it appears in the sitemap on its own.

Your sitemap is at your site's address followed by /wp-sitemap.xml, for example:

https://www.yoursite.com/wp-sitemap.xml

The quickest way to open it is Your sitemap, the first of the Quick links on the SEO screen in the admin sidebar. The SEO checklist card on the same screen shows how many pages, listings, categories and blog posts it holds.

The sitemap opens as a plain list of links. That is normal: it is meant for search engines.

What is left out​

The theme keeps some things out of the sitemap so search engines are not sent to pages that would not work for them, for example listings and pages you have chosen to hide from search engines. Draft and private content is never included.

The theme's own pages, such as About, Contact, FAQ and Terms, have a small sitemap of their own inside yours, so search engines find them too. Pages you have switched off on Design ▸ All Pages are left out.

If you use an SEO plugin​

Yoast SEO and Rank Math replace the WordPress sitemap with their own, usually at /sitemap_index.xml. When one of them is active, the Your sitemap link opens theirs instead, and the plugin decides what goes in it.

If your site is set to discourage search engines (Settings ▸ Reading), WordPress switches the sitemap off, and the Your sitemap link says so and takes you to that setting. If the SEO screen says sitemaps are switched off for another reason, a plugin or a setting on your site has turned them off. Check your plugins, or ask your developer.

Submit it to Google​

Search engines find your sitemap in time on their own, but submitting it is quicker and lets you see any problems:

  1. Open Google Search Console and choose your site.
  2. Click Sitemaps in the menu on the left.
  3. Type wp-sitemap.xml (or sitemap_index.xml if you use Yoast SEO or Rank Math) in the box and click Submit.

Google checks it over the next few days. You only need to do this once: Google keeps reading it.

For Bing, do the same under Sitemaps in Bing Webmaster Tools.