Sitemap Generator

📖 What this does

A sitemap is an XML file listing the URLs you want indexed, handed to the search engines. For a new site, a site with many pages, or one where internal links run deep, it noticeably speeds up discovery. Writing the file is not hard, but the format has a lot of small requirements: escaping, protocol prefixes, a hard cap on entries. Get any of them wrong and submission fails, usually with an unhelpful message.

With this tool you paste a list and get a file out. One URL per line, and if a particular URL needs its own values you can write it as url | date | frequency | priority. Anything you leave out falls back to the defaults underneath. Duplicates are dropped automatically and lines that do not look like URLs are called out.

While generating, the count and uncompressed size are tallied against the specification's limits of 50000 URLs and 50 MB, with a warning when you cross either. For very large sites you can switch to generating a sitemap index, which turns one oversized file into a directory of smaller child maps.

✨ Features

• One URL per line, with an optional | syntax to set date, frequency and priority per row
• Defaults below apply to every row that does not specify its own
• Automatic de-duplication, plus per-line warnings for anything that does not look like a URL
• Live counts of entries and uncompressed size against the 50000 and 50 MB limits
• Can switch to a sitemap index, which is the right shape for very large sites
• Output either indented or collapsed to a single line, with XML special characters escaped

🚀 How to use

1. Paste your URL list into the box, one address per line
2. For rows needing their own values, write url | date | frequency | priority
3. Set the default change frequency, priority and last-modified date below
4. Read the counts and checks panel and clear anything marked red
5. Download the file to your site root, then submit it in each webmaster console

⚠️ Keep in mind

• URLs must be absolute: the protocol prefix is not optional. A bare domain is invalid, so write out the full address including the scheme
• The sample omits the protocol: the example entries use the short form to keep pasting easy. Add the scheme to all of them before real use
• Priority barely matters: search engines largely ignore this field. Leave it at the default rather than tuning every page by hand
• Only canonical URLs belong here: parameterised duplicates, redirect targets and pages behind a login should not appear in a sitemap
• Watch escaping if you edit by hand: an ampersand in a URL has to be written as &. The tool handles it, but manual edits can break the file

A note on what to do once the file is live. Upload it to the root of the domain, then submit the address in each webmaster console you use. Resubmission is only necessary when the content changes substantially; the engines will re-read a sitemap on their own schedule otherwise. If your site already has a robots.txt, add a Sitemap line pointing at the file, which lets crawlers find it without being told. Should you discover later that some listed pages are excluded by robots.txt, remove them from the sitemap rather than leaving the two files in conflict, since contradictory signals are harder to diagnose than a shorter list.