Free XML Sitemap Generator

What Is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file that lists every important URL on your website. It tells search engines like Google and Bing which pages exist, when they were last updated, how often they change and how important they are relative to each other.

Search engines don't need a sitemap to crawl your site — they discover pages through links. But a sitemap dramatically speeds up discovery, especially for:

• New sites with few backlinks and little crawl budget
• Large sites (e-commerce, news) where deep pages rarely get linked
• Orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them
• Rich media content like images, video and news

Sitemap XML structure in 20 seconds

A basic URL entry looks like this:

<url>
  <loc>https://yoursite.com/page</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-01-15</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

Rules for a valid sitemap

• Maximum 50,000 URLs per sitemap file
• Maximum 50 MB uncompressed per sitemap file
• Every URL must be on the same domain as the sitemap
• URLs must be absolute (start with https://) and use URL-encoded characters
• XML must be UTF-8 encoded
• Only include indexable URLs — never blocked by robots.txt or set to noindex

What do priority and changefreq actually mean?

Honest answer: Google officially ignores both priority and changefreq. They were part of the original sitemap protocol, but Google's Gary Illyes confirmed years ago that Google does not use them for ranking or crawl scheduling. Bing has said something similar.

So why include them? Three reasons:

1. Some other search engines and SEO tools still read them.
2. They force you to think about relative importance, which improves internal linking.
3. Having them doesn't hurt — Google simply ignores the fields it doesn't use.

The only field that matters to Google is <lastmod>, and only if it's accurate. A fake lastmod date (bumping it every day) trains Google to ignore your sitemap — so always use the real modification date.

Common sitemap mistakes

• Listing noindex pages — this confuses Google and shows contradictory signals.
• Listing redirect URLs (301/302) instead of the final destination.
• Using relative URLs like /about instead of https://yoursite.com/about.
• Not including canonical URLs (adding both example.com and www.example.com versions).
• Uploading a sitemap but never submitting it in Search Console.
• Bumping lastmod on every URL every day regardless of actual changes.

Frequently Asked Questions

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