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Are you wondering how to create a Sitemap in WordPress and what is it for?
In the past, some websites had their sitemap as a list with pages where we could see a list with all the pages of the site in HTML format on a single page.
The purpose of this page was to show a general overview to the web visitor, but today there are sitemaps in XML format that really help the content of your site to be indexed in search engines.
The fact of having a sitemap makes us speak the same language as the search engines and makes it easier for them to find us.
What is a sitemap in XML format?
A sitemap is nothing more than a list of pages of a website that is accessible to any user.
When we talk about a sitemap in XML format, it is a way of telling search engines all the pages that exist on our website and are the ones that we want search engines to take into account for their searches.
It is also able to tell you the last update date of each page and which are the most important links over others.
In simple words, if we think of our site as a house, we can say that it is a plan of our construction where we have the location of part and we make it easier for Google to find us.
Why do we need to have an XML Sitemap?
For optimize SEO And be easier for search engines to find It is very important to have a “Sitemap”.
You can get to have a page that is not indexed by search engines and a sitemap is a way to show them to search engines and that they can index it correctly.
Another important feature when you have a blog that is just starting out and when you have few or no links to your posts, this makes it difficult for search engines to find you. With a sitemap you will facilitate this work since all the entries will be there.
How to create a Sitemap in WordPress?
A very easy way to create a WordPress sitemap is by installing the plugin
Once we install the plugin that, in addition to helping us optimize our WordPress posts, we have the option to create our XML Sitemap.
With the plugin installed, we go to Settings > General.
Then a screen like the one below will appear and we activate the XML sitemaps functionality and save the changes.
Once the changes are saved we can access our Sitemap in WordPress.
By default it is created with the following address, for example for this site it is:
How to notify Google that we have created a Sitemap in WordPress?
You have seen how easy it is to create a WordPress sitemap with a plugin Yoast SEO. But before that we must tell Google where to find it and to validate it, otherwise everything we will have done will not be of much use.
Now the next step is to validate it using Google Webmaster Tools. This is going to tell us how many pages we have on our site and if we have any errors.
In the first place, if we do not have our site registered in the Google Webmaster tool, we will have our website.
Submit sitemap in Search Console
Once you have verified your domain in Search Console and created the sitemap in WordPress, it is time to submit it to Google Search Console.
To do this we will go to the Search Console control panel> Index> Sitemaps.
In this step we are going to submit the sitemap that we have generated before: sitemap_index.xml
Entering the URL we can first test the sitemap to verify that it has no errors.
Once we have submitted the sitemap, a panel with the number of submitted and indexed pages of the sitemap in question will appear in Search Console.
In the coverage section within Search Console we have several indicators such as “valid with warning”. In the case of sending URLs through the sitemap that are blocked by it, it will notify us.
If we have followed these steps we will have created the Sitemap in WordPress.
This will be automatically updated with the same plugin and we will not have to worry about it.
In case you want to learn more about it, we have a course on said plugin on the University platform.
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