About the XML Sitemap Generator
A sitemap lists the pages you want search engines to crawl. This generator takes a plain list of URLs, one per line, and writes a standards-compliant sitemap.xml with a lastmod of today for each, plus optional changefreq and priority elements if you want them (most search engines now ignore those two, so omitting them is fine). URLs are XML-escaped so ampersands in query strings do not break the file.
The format sets hard limits. A single sitemap file holds at most 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed, and beyond either figure you split the list and point at the parts from a sitemap index file. Every URL has to be absolute and on the same host as the sitemap itself, and lastmod has to be a W3C datetime, a requirement the date-only form used here satisfies.
The common mistake is treating the file as a wish list. Listing URLs that redirect, return 404, are blocked in robots.txt or carry a canonical tag pointing somewhere else sends contradictory signals and shows up as errors in Search Console, so keep the list to canonical, indexable pages that answer with a 200.
It does not crawl your site, so you supply the URL list, which you can produce from a CMS export or the Link Extractor; running it through URL Validator first is worth the minute. Reference the sitemap in your robots.txt and submit it in Search Console.
How to use
- Paste your URLs, one per line.
- Optionally set change frequency and priority.
- Download sitemap.xml and upload it to your site root.
Common questions
- Does it crawl my site to find pages?
- No. Paste the list of URLs yourself; the tool formats them.
- Should I include changefreq and priority?
- Optional. Google ignores them, so you can omit both without harm.
- What is the URL limit?
- 50,000 per sitemap file. Use a sitemap index for more.