Sitemap.xml Generator
Developer ToolsGenerate a valid sitemap.xml for any website. Paste your URLs, set change frequency and priority per page — ready for Google Search Console in seconds.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap.xml is a machine-readable file that tells search engines about every publicly accessible, indexable page on your website. Without one, search engine crawlers discover your pages entirely through link-following — starting from your homepage and moving through internal links. Pages that are buried deep in your site, orphaned (with no inbound links), or newly added may never be discovered through crawling alone.
The Sitemap.xml Generator converts a list of URLs into a correctly formatted XML sitemap, ready to submit to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or any other search engine platform. The XML format follows the Sitemaps protocol standard, which defines the structure of <urlset>, <url>, <loc>, <lastmod>, <changefreq>, and <priority> elements.
Each URL entry in the generated sitemap includes:
<loc>— the full absolute URL of the page<lastmod>— today's date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD), indicating when the page was last modified<changefreq>— how often the page is expected to change (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)<priority>— a relative importance score from 0.1 to 1.0
The generator also counts the total URLs in your list and displays it alongside the XML output — useful for verifying you have not accidentally omitted pages during a copy-paste.
Use this alongside robots.txt Generator to give search engines the complete picture: robots.txt tells them what not to crawl, while the sitemap tells them what to prioritise. Once your sitemap is live, use UTM Link Generator to tag campaign links pointing to those pages so traffic is accurately attributed in your analytics platform.
How to use this Sitemap calculator
- Collect all the indexable page URLs for your website — use your CMS's page list, a URL export from your analytics tool, or a crawl export from a tool like Screaming Frog.
- Paste the URLs into the URLs (one per line) text area — one complete URL per line, including the protocol (
https://). Remove any duplicate or redirect URLs before pasting. - Select the Change Frequency that best describes how often most of your pages are updated — choose
weeklyfor an active blog,monthlyfor a mostly-static business site,yearlyfor archived content. - Set the Default Priority — use
1.0for your homepage,0.8–0.9for primary category or service pages,0.5–0.7for standard content pages, and0.3or lower for low-importance archived pages. - Review the Total URLs counter to confirm the count matches your expectations.
- Copy the sitemap.xml Content from the output box and save it as a file named
sitemap.xml. - Upload
sitemap.xmlto your website's root directory (alongsiderobots.txtandindex.html), then submit the URL to Google Search Console via the Sitemaps section.
Formula & Methodology
The generator produces standard sitemap XML conforming to the Sitemaps.org protocol (xmlns:http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9). Each URL in your input produces one<url>block:xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://example.com/about/</loc> <lastmod>2026-06-24</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>Thelastmodvalue is set to today's date in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) for all entries. Blank lines in the input are filtered out. The URL count is the number of non-empty lines after filtering. File size limit: A single sitemap.xml must not exceed 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed. For sites exceeding this limit, split into multiple sitemaps and create a sitemap index file that references each one — the sitemapindex format uses<sitemapindex>and<sitemap><loc>tags following the same protocol.
Frequently Asked Questions
A sitemap.xml is a structured XML file that lists all the important URLs on a website along with metadata such as when each page was last modified, how frequently it changes, and its relative priority. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex use sitemaps to discover pages they might not find through normal link-following, especially on large sites or pages with few inbound links.
Small sites with fewer than a few hundred pages and good internal linking are usually discovered and crawled by search engines without a sitemap. However, submitting a sitemap is still recommended because it gives you access to coverage reports in Google Search Console — you can see which URLs Google has indexed, which have errors, and which are excluded. Even a ten-page site benefits from this visibility.
changefreq tells crawlers how often a page typically changes — values range from 'always' (e.g. a live ticker) to 'never' (e.g. an archived article). priority is a relative importance score from 0.1 to 1.0 that signals which pages matter most within your site. Neither field directly controls how often Google crawls a page — Google uses its own signals to determine crawl frequency — but both help communicate your intent.
A single sitemap.xml file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed. If your site has more URLs than this, you should create multiple sitemap files and reference them from a sitemap index file (sitemapindex.xml). For most websites — including e-commerce stores with a few thousand products — a single sitemap is sufficient.
Open Google Search Console, select your property, and navigate to Sitemaps in the left sidebar. Paste the full URL of your sitemap (e.g. https://example.com/sitemap.xml) and click Submit. Google will then crawl the sitemap and begin indexing the listed URLs. You can also add a Sitemap directive to your robots.txt file — this allows any crawler, not just Google, to discover your sitemap automatically.
Setting the homepage to 1.0 and using decreasing values for category and article pages is common practice — it signals that the homepage is the most important entry point. However, Google has stated that it largely ignores priority values, so do not spend significant time fine-tuning them. A more useful signal to Google is the actual internal link structure of your site, where pages receiving more links are treated as more important.
lastmod is the date the page was last significantly modified, formatted as YYYY-MM-DD (or with full ISO 8601 datetime). Google uses accurate lastmod dates to prioritise re-crawling updated pages — if you set lastmod to today's date for pages that have not changed, Google learns to ignore the field. The generator sets lastmod to today's date for all entries, which is correct for newly added pages but should be updated per-page for existing content management system exports.
You can generate the XML structure from any list of URLs, but only the site owner can submit a sitemap to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools for a verified property. The generator is useful for building sitemap content that you or your client then uploads to their server. There is no restriction on generating the XML itself — it is a plain text file that anyone can create.
Copy the sitemap.xml content from the output box and save it as a file named sitemap.xml. Upload it to the root directory of your website — the same level as your robots.txt file and homepage. Then submit the URL (https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) to Google Search Console via the Sitemaps report. You should also add a Sitemap directive to your robots.txt file so that all crawlers can discover it.
No. The Sitemap.xml Generator runs entirely in your browser. The URL list you enter is processed locally by JavaScript on your device and is never transmitted to any server or stored anywhere. You can safely paste your real production URLs without any privacy concern.
Exclude pages you do not want indexed — redirected pages, paginated filter URLs (e.g. /products?sort=price), duplicate content, login-only pages, thank-you confirmation pages, and any URL blocked by robots.txt. Including low-quality or duplicate URLs in a sitemap wastes Google's crawl budget and can signal a lower-quality site. A sitemap should represent only the canonical, publicly accessible, indexable pages you want to appear in search results.
Standard sitemap.xml only lists page URLs. For image and video indexing, Google supports separate image sitemap and video sitemap extensions with additional XML tags (image:image, video:video). These are separate files or sections appended to your main sitemap. For most sites, standard URL sitemaps are sufficient; image sitemaps are most beneficial for image-heavy sites like photography portfolios or stock photo platforms.
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