XML Sitemap Generator
Paste your URLs, get a valid sitemap — correctly escaped, correctly split, ready to submit.
sitemap.xml
sitemap-index.xml
You have more than 50,000 URLs, so they must be split across several files with an index pointing at them.
What the xML Sitemap Generator does
An XML sitemap is a list of the URLs on your site that you want search engines to know about. It does not make pages rank, and it is not a substitute for internal links — a page nobody links to is a page nobody finds, sitemap or not. What it does is help crawlers discover pages efficiently, which matters most for large sites, new sites with few inbound links, and pages that are deep in the structure.
This generator takes a plain list of URLs and produces valid XML. It escapes the characters that must be escaped — ampersands in particular, which are the single most common cause of a sitemap being rejected as malformed — and validates each URL as it goes. It flags relative URLs, URLs containing spaces, entries over the 2,048-character limit, HTTP URLs on an HTTPS site, tracking parameters, and mixed hostnames.
Two optional fields are set to omit by default, deliberately.
<changefreq> and <priority> are part of the sitemap
specification, but Google has said publicly that it ignores both. They are noise: a sitemap where
every page claims priority 1.0 conveys nothing, and a page claiming to change hourly when it has not
changed in a year is simply wrong. <lastmod> is the one Google does use, and only
when it is accurate — setting it to today's date on every page devalues the signal entirely.
A single sitemap can hold 50,000 URLs and must stay under 50 MB uncompressed. Past that you need several files and a sitemap index pointing at them, which this tool generates automatically when your list is long enough.
How to use it
- Paste your URLs, one per line. Absolute URLs including https:// are required.
- Set a last-modified date only if it is genuinely accurate for these pages.
- Leave changefreq and priority omitted — Google ignores them.
- Download the file, put it at your site root, and submit it in Google Search Console.
A worked example
Six URLs produce this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/guides/running-shoes-flat-feet</loc>
</url>
</urlset>Deliberately minimal. Now the failure this tool exists to prevent: a URL such as
https://example.com/search?q=shoes&sort=price pasted in raw produces invalid XML,
because a bare ampersand is not legal in an XML document. The generator escapes it to
& automatically. A hand-built sitemap containing three such URLs will be
rejected outright by Search Console with a parse error, and the error message rarely points at the
line.
Frequently asked questions
Does a sitemap improve my rankings?
No. It helps pages get discovered and crawled, which is a prerequisite for ranking but not a ranking factor itself. A page in a sitemap with no internal links pointing at it will usually be crawled and then largely ignored.
Should I set priority and changefreq?
No. Google has stated it ignores both. They add bytes and invite inconsistency — almost every sitemap that sets priority sets it to 1.0 for everything, which conveys nothing. lastmod is the field worth setting, and only when it is truthful.
How many URLs can one sitemap hold?
50,000, and no more than 50 MB uncompressed. Beyond that, split into several files and reference them from a sitemap index. This tool builds the index for you when your list crosses the limit.
Where should the sitemap live?
Conventionally at /sitemap.xml in your site root. Reference it from robots.txt with a Sitemap: line and submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.