WordPress Sitemap Generator
Our WordPress Sitemap Generator crawls your WP installation to extract all live posts, pages, and custom post types. It's the perfect solution for headless WordPress builds or users who want to avoid bloated SEO plugins.
How to Use This Tool
Enter WordPress URL
Analyze Site
Review URLs
Choose Output
Copy or Download
Recommended Action
How WordPress Handles Sitemaps
Since version 5.5, WordPress Core automatically generates a basic sitemap index located at /wp-sitemap.xml. This native sitemap includes all public post types (Posts, Pages) and taxonomies (Categories, Tags).
However, the vast majority of WordPress users override this native feature using SEO plugins like Yoast, RankMath, or All in One SEO, which typically generate their sitemaps at /sitemap_index.xml.
What BuildSitemap Checks
BuildSitemap ignores the plugin-generated XML files and performs a live HTTP crawl of your frontend. This ensures we only map the URLs that actually exist and are accessible to users.
We analyze path structures to differentiate between standard pages, blog posts (often found under /blog/ or dated folders like /2026/09/), and category archives, allowing you to generate a perfectly structured sitemap.
URLs We Discover
- Standard Pages (/about-us, /contact)
- Blog Posts (/blog/post-slug or /year/month/post-slug)
- Category Archives (/category/news/)
- Custom Post Types (/portfolio/project-slug)
URLs to Exclude
- Author archives if you are a single-author blog (/author/admin/)
- Tag archives (often leads to thin/duplicate content)
- Attachment pages (WordPress creates a URL for every image upload by default)
- Paginated archives (/page/2/, /page/3/)
- Reply-to-comment URLs (?replytocom=)
WordPress Sitemap Structure
A well-architected WordPress sitemap isolates your high-value content from taxonomy bloat. You should have a dedicated sitemap-posts.xml and sitemap-pages.xml.
It is heavily advised to exclude tag sitemaps and author sitemaps unless your site is a large, multi-author publication, as these taxonomies often trigger "Crawled - currently not indexed" warnings in Google Search Console due to low content quality.
Common WordPress Problems
WordPress automatically creates dedicated URLs for media attachments. SEO plugins often fail to redirect these, leaving thousands of thin image pages in the sitemap.
Plugin conflicts resulting in 404 errors when trying to load /sitemap_index.xml.
Accidentally leaving the 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' setting checked in Reading Settings, which adds a noindex tag to every page.
How to Use Your Generated Sitemap
If you are using our tool to replace a broken plugin sitemap, download the generated sitemap.xml file and place it in the root directory of your WordPress installation via FTP or your hosting file manager.
If you are building a Headless WordPress site (e.g., using Next.js or Gatsby with WPGraphQL), place this generated file in your frontend's public directory to ensure search engines crawl your decoupled frontend rather than your backend WP admin URL.
Example WordPress Output
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/blog/how-to-optimize-wordpress</loc>
<lastmod>2026-09-21</lastmod>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/about-us</loc>
<lastmod>2026-09-15</lastmod>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>