Sitemap Generator

What it is

A sitemap is essentially a table of contents for your site, written in a format search engines understand — a list of every page you have, handed to them directly instead of hoping they stumble across everything by following links around your site on their own.

Why it matters

Search engines do eventually find most of your content just by crawling around, but a sitemap speeds that up and makes it more reliable — especially for a page that isn't linked from many places, or content you've just published and want indexed sooner rather than later.

It updates itself

You normally don't need to touch it. The sitemap is regenerated automatically whenever you:

• publish a new item, or save changes to an item that is published;
• unpublish an item (turn it back into a draft);
• move an item to the trash, or restore it from the trash.

The same goes for every content type, including your custom content types. The first time the sitemap is generated, the CMS also adds the Sitemap: line to your site's robots.txt for you, unless one is already there — so crawlers find it without any manual setup.

When to update it by hand

Open Tools → Sitemap Generator and click Update Sitemap (or Generate Sitemap if none exists yet) when something changed that isn't a publish or an unpublish:

• you edited the list of excluded URLs (see below) — exclusions apply the next time the sitemap is built;
• you added or edited the description of a category or a tag, or changed a content type's URLs;
• you want to notify search engines with IndexNow (see below);
• you simply want to check that it's up to date.

The page shows where the file lives, when it was last updated and how big it is, with a link to open it.

What's in the sitemap

• Your homepage.
• Every published item — articles, pages, projects and custom content types. Drafts and trashed items are never included.
• Category and tag pages, but only once they have a description. A category or tag without one is kept out of the sitemap and marked "noindex" on the site, so search engines don't index thin pages. Write a short description to bring it back in, then update the sitemap.
• A real "last modified" date for each URL. For an item it is the date it last changed; for a category or tag, the date of its most recent item. Search engines use it to decide what is worth recrawling.

Listing pages like "all articles" or "all projects" are deliberately left out — they don't carry unique content of their own, so including them would add clutter without helping anyone find anything new.

Excluding URLs

Some pages don't belong in search results — a thank-you page, a private landing page, a page you're still tweaking. Add them to the Excluded URLs list on the same screen:

1. Type the page's path, for example thank-you or /thank-you/. Pasting the full address also works, the CMS keeps only the path.
2. Click Add. To bring a page back, click Remove next to it.
3. Click Update Sitemap — exclusions are applied the next time the sitemap is built.

Notify search engines with IndexNow

Below the update button, the Notify search engines with IndexNow box is checked by default. IndexNow is a protocol supported by Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver: instead of waiting for them to come back and crawl your site, the CMS tells them which pages changed.

• It only sends the pages that changed since the last notification, so it stays light. If nothing changed, you're told so.
• There's nothing to sign up for. The CMS creates a verification key file (a .txt file with a random name) at the root of your site — leave it in place and publicly accessible.
• It only happens when you click the button, not on the automatic updates.
• It can't work on a local test site or a password-protected one, since search engines must be able to reach your site.
• Google doesn't support IndexNow. For Google, submit your sitemap address once in Google Search Console and let it do the rest.

Submitting it to search engines

Do this once: add your sitemap address (shown on the page, https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. From then on, the automatic updates keep what they read up to date.