User-Friendly Guide to Create Sitemap in WordPress in a simple way

Your WordPress website needs a sitemap to help search engines find and index all the pages and posts correctly. A WordPress Sitemap also help search engines discover the new content, urls and blogs posts on a WordPress website. A sitemap is an extremely important part of SEO (search engine optimization) process. As soon as your WordPress website is ready the next step is create a Sitemap in WordPress and submit it to the Google Search Console and to the Bing Webmaster tools. In this post you will learn how to create a Sitemap in WordPress using WordPress Plugins.

A Sitemap contains a list of urls of all the pages and posts in a WordPress webiste cotained in an XML file.

Before 2005 the sitemaps are used for humans to be able to find all the pages of a website that has large number of pages and they were primarily in HTML format.

As the websites became more complex and CMS systems such as WordPress generated highly dynamic pages, Google introuced Sitemap 0.84 Protocol, designed to use the XML format.

Google’s XML format was designed for the search engines to help discover the urls and the content faster and more efficiently.

Do not confuse an XML sitemap as tool that can help your website rank.

It is way to help search engines discover the data on your website and index it accordingly.

Easy Guide to Create a Sitemap in WordPress

You can create a Sitemap in WordPress in several different ways but the easiest way to create an XML sitemap in WordPress is to use a plugin.

We will cover the best WordPress Plugins in this post that you can use to create a Sitemap for your website.

A very useful resource by Google about creating sitemaps.

Create a Sitemap with Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO WordPress plugin is the most popular and robust plugin for SEO (search engine optimization) and it also has an inbuilt feature to create a Sitemap in WordPress with just one click.

To create a WordPress Sitemap using Yoast simply install the yoast plugin and activate it as shown in the image below:

wordpress yoast install

The next step is to generate an XML Sitemap using Yoast and for this look on the left side panel of your WordPress dashboard look for SEO >> General and then click the Features tab and Toggle the XML sitemaps button to On and it will automatically generate a Sitemap for your WordPress Website.

After your finish these steps, Yoast SEO will generate a link to your WordPress sitemap /sitemap_index.xml through which you can access your sitemap and also submit it to Google through search console.

Google XML Sitemaps – Another very popular stand-alone plugin to create a Sitemap in WordPress is the Goole XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold.

To install this WordPress Sitemap plugin simply install it and activate it as shown in the image:

The XML sitemap feature is not active by default, so look for the settings >> xml-Sitemap on the left side panel in your WordPress Dashboard to create a Sitemap. It also provides an option to generate HTML version of a Sitemap.

Once you are done with the above steps, Google XML Sitemaps will generate a link to your WordPress sitemap /index.xml through which you can access your sitemap and submit to Google as well.

Both the mentioned plugins above shall help you create a sitemap in WordPress in minutes with accuracy.

Sitemaps are extremely important for your website, so go ahead follow the instructions above and create a sitemap for WordPress Website.

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