XML Sitemap Generator

How to use the sitemap generator

Paste the URLs you want search engines to find, one per line, or load the example. For relative paths such as /about, fill in the base URL and each path is resolved against it. To give a page its own last-modified date, put the date after the URL with a space or tab in between: https://example.com/pricing 2026-09-20. Lines that start with # are ignored, so you can keep notes in the list.

The XML updates as you type (for lists over 5,000 lines, press Generate sitemap). Duplicates and #fragments are removed, invalid characters are percent-encoded, and every rejected line is listed under Problems with its line number and the reason. Then download sitemap.xml, or each part plus sitemap_index.xml for a large list.

What an XML sitemap is and when you need one

An XML sitemap is a file that lists the URLs on your site you want search engines to crawl, with optional details such as when each page last changed. It follows the protocol published at sitemaps.org, which the major search engines support. A sitemap helps crawlers discover pages; it doesn't guarantee that every URL is crawled or indexed.

Google says a sitemap matters most when your site is large, when it's new and has few links from other sites, or when it has a lot of video, image or news content. A small site, about 500 pages or fewer, that links every important page from the home page may not need one. Most sites still benefit, and a free sitemap generator makes it quick to create one.

The sitemap.xml format

A minimal sitemap with one URL, annotated:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <!-- Required: the full URL, with & < > ' " entity-escaped -->
    <loc>https://example.com/events?city=Oslo&amp;year=2026</loc>
    <!-- Optional: YYYY-MM-DD or a full W3C Datetime -->
    <lastmod>2026-09-20</lastmod>
    <!-- Optional hints that Google ignores -->
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

The file must be UTF-8 and starts with the XML declaration. urlset is the root element and declares the sitemaps.org namespace. Each page gets a url element with a required loc: a fully qualified URL including the protocol, shorter than 2,048 characters. As in any XML file, the characters & < > ' " must be entity-escaped, which is why the ampersand in the query string is written &.

lastmod uses the W3C Datetime format: a date like 2026-09-20, or a full timestamp with a time zone like 2026-09-20T14:30:00+00:00. changefreq takes always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never. priority is a number from 0.0 to 1.0, relative to other pages on the same site, and defaults to 0.5.

Which tags Google actually uses

Google ignores priority and changefreq. It uses lastmod when the value is consistently and verifiably accurate, meaning it reflects the last significant change to the page: its main content, structured data or links, not the copyright year in the footer. If every URL gets today's date on every build, the dates stop meaning anything, so leave lastmod out rather than guess.

Limits and sitemap index files

One sitemap can hold at most 50,000 URLs and be at most 50 MB (52,428,800 bytes) uncompressed. You can gzip the files, but the limit applies to the uncompressed size. For more, split the list into several sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://example.com/sitemap-1.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-09-20</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

An index can reference up to 50,000 sitemaps, which must be on the same site as the index, in the same folder or below it. This XML sitemap generator splits large lists automatically into sitemap-1.xml, sitemap-2.xml and so on, plus a sitemap_index.xml under the sitemap location you choose. Submit the index; search engines find the rest.

Which URLs to include

List the URLs you want to appear in search results, and only those. Each one should:

• be the canonical version. If the same content is reachable at several URLs (with and without a trailing slash, or with tracking parameters), list only the one you prefer;
• return a 200 status, not a redirect or an error. The HTTP Header Checker shows the status code a URL really returns;
• be indexable: not blocked by robots.txt, which you can check with the Robots.txt Tester, and not marked noindex.

Leave out login pages, internal search results and session-ID URLs. Keep every URL on the sitemap's own host and protocol: a sitemap at https://example.com/sitemap.xml shouldn't list https://shop.example.com pages unless you've verified both sites in Search Console or the other site's robots.txt points to it. Unless submitted in Search Console, a sitemap also covers only its own folder and below, so the site root is the usual place for it.

How to submit a sitemap

Upload the files to your web server, then tell search engines where they are:

• In Google Search Console, open the Sitemaps report for your property, enter the sitemap or index URL and submit it. The report then shows whether Google could read the file.
• In robots.txt, add a line such as Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml. It takes a full URL, doesn't belong to any User-agent group, and you can list several sitemaps. The tool above writes this line for you.

Google has deprecated its old sitemap ping endpoint, so use these two methods instead. Submitting is only a hint: search engines still decide what to crawl and when.

Other kinds of sitemaps

Extensions cover specific content: image sitemaps list the images on a page, video sitemaps add details such as running time, and news sitemaps give article titles and publication dates for Google News. Hreflang annotations (xhtml:link rel="alternate") list the language versions of a page. Google also accepts plain text files with one URL per line, and RSS or Atom feeds. This tool creates the standard URL sitemap most sites need.

What this tool doesn't do

This sitemap.xml generator doesn't crawl your site. It builds the XML from the list you give it, so the sitemap is only as complete as that list. It checks each URL's syntax, not the live page, so it can't tell whether a URL returns 200, redirects or carries noindex. Export the list from your CMS, a crawler or your analytics, and spot-check it before you submit. Everything runs in your browser; the URLs you paste aren't uploaded anywhere.