XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable list of the pages on your website. It doesn’t make pages rank, but it helps search engines find them, especially new pages, deep pages and pages with few internal links. Think of it as a delivery list you hand to Googlebot so it doesn’t have to discover everything by following links.

Why it matters

Bean & Barrel Coffee adds a dozen new products every season. Some sit three or four clicks deep in category pages. A sitemap that updates automatically when a product is published means Google can learn about the new URLs within days instead of waiting to stumble on them through crawling alone. For a small site with good internal links, the benefit is smaller, but it is still worth having.

What a sitemap looks like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/product/colombia-huila/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-14</lastmod>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/brew-guides/french-press/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-02</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Rules worth knowing

• One sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed. Larger sites use a sitemap index file that points to several sitemaps.
• Google uses lastmod when it is consistently accurate. It ignores priority and changefreq.
• Only list canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status. Redirects, 404s and noindexed pages don’t belong there.
• The old “ping” URL for notifying Google of sitemap changes was retired in 2023. Submit the sitemap in Search Console and reference it in robots.txt instead.

How to submit and check

WordPress creates a sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml by default, and SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math replace it with their own (usually /sitemap_index.xml). Add that address to the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console and add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt.

Search Console then reports how many URLs were discovered from each sitemap. A Site Audit crawl checks that a sitemap exists and is listed in robots.txt, and flags sitemap URLs that redirect, return errors or are noindexed.

Common mistakes

Listing every URL, including tag archives, filtered pages and old redirects, makes the sitemap noisy and less trusted. So does setting every lastmod to today’s date on every build. Keep the list clean and the dates honest.