How to generate a sitemap ? A step by step full guide
So you need a sitemap for your website, but you do not even know what it is nor how to generate one ? Follow our guide !
As said in our FAQ (Click here to have a look at our FAQ), a sitemap is a representation of your whole website, and has to be a file in a language format called XML.
It contains all the resources that you want to make visible to the robots of Google or other indexing services.
It can list all the posts of your blog, your contact page, your homepage, your products, and so on.
If you use for instance a CMS (Content Managing System) for your website, the sitemap can be generated automatically without your intervention. Otherwise, it's up to you to describe the resources that seem important to you, and that need to be indexed by Google, Bing, ...
Still there? Fine, so let's continue!
There are different ways to generate a sitemap. You can use automatic tools like plugins, external services, or even do it completely yourself.
If you use a CMS (Content Managing System) to power up your website, there is surely a plugin or addon to generate automatically for you a sitemap representation of your website. This is the case for the most part of the well-known solutions of the market, such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, ...
These solutions know exactly how your website is constructed, and what is visible to the public, such as posts, comments, pages, and so on. This is, therefore, a good solution to let one of the plugins available in the plugins market places do its work., and they provide you with plenty of options to customize what you want in your sitemap. For example, you can often tell that you don't want the posts comments in your sitemap.
You 'll find below a few links to find a plugin for your CMS. (we don't get money for that ;) )
- For Wordpress: Have a look at Wordpress sitemap plugins
- For Joomla: Have a look at Joomla sitemap plugins
- For Drupal: Have a look at Drupal sitemap module
- For other systems, please check the homepage of the solution you use.
It is not an ideal solution, but it can help you to generate your first sitemap. We won't recommend that solution as you have less control on what is generated. It acts by scanning your whole website. You must give the entry point of your website, and it will then follow each one of your internal links. If you have a lot of pages, it can take some time, or you can even be asked to pay some fees for the use of the service.
You can use for instance this service: xml-sitemaps.com (hey, we still don't get money for that !) Firstly, you will be asked to enter the address of your website. Then, after a small wait, your sitemap will be ready to be downloaded.
It is the ultimate solution, but not so easy to put in place. You, the owner, designer, or developer of your website, you exactly know how is structured your website, what it contains, and what should be visible to the public.
To do that, you can use a visual sitemap creation tool like dynomapper, slickplan, ... It will assist you in defining your sitemap with a user-friendly interface.
If you are comfortable with programming languages, you can search for a function or class in a language of your choice, that will help you generate the sitemap file. You can even have a look at github website that provides a ton of code for any functionality.
Finally, why not write your own class/function in any language to keep the full control on what is generated, and moreover, to fit exactly your needs ?! That's the best way to get a fine sitemap file, but it is surely not accessible to everyone.
By now, you should have a new xml sitemap, ready to be used.
With your freshly generated sitemap file, you can do a lot of things, described below.
By indicating to the search engines the presence of your sitemap file, they will then index each one of the pages present in the sitemap file.
It can take quite long time, as there are plenty of websites to index all over the world. When indexed, your page will appear in the search results of the search engine.
Using, for instance, Google, you can check the progress of the indexing of your pages by typing that command in the search field :
site:http://www.mydomain.tld
It will display only the links of your website.
At Weosty.com, we provide services to force the refreshment of the cache of your website.
When subscribing to one of our services, we ask you to provide us with a sitemap file. That's almost all we require from you. After that, the job is on our side ! To know more about the whole process, please consult our "how it works" page.
You can also have a look at our free services and our paid services.