Free XML Sitemap Generator
Create an XML sitemap for your website online in a few minutes. Enter your homepage URL and the generator crawls your site from there, keeps only the pages search engines should index, and gives you a sitemap.xml to download. Up to 500 pages free, no account.
Last updated
Generate your sitemap
Enter your homepage. The generator follows your links one page at a time and lists every page a search engine should index.
Your sitemap
Pages left out
| URL | Why |
|---|
How does the sitemap generator work?
Crawl
Starting from your homepage, it follows ordinary links to pages on the same host, one page at a time. It reads your robots.txt first and waits between requests if you set a Crawl-delay.
Filter
Each page has to earn its place: a 200 answer, HTML, no noindex, and a canonical that points to itself. Redirects are replaced by their destination.
Write
You get a valid sitemap.xml, with a lastmod only where the site gives a real date, plus a plain text list and an HTML list of the same pages.
Which pages go in the sitemap?
Only the pages you want search engines to index. A sitemap is a list of your canonical pages, so the generator leaves out anything a search engine would drop anyway, and tells you why:
| Left out | Why |
|---|---|
| Pages blocked by robots.txt | A crawler may not fetch them, so listing them only produces errors. |
Pages marked noindex | You have asked for them not to be indexed. |
| Pages whose canonical points elsewhere | The canonical page is listed instead. |
| Redirects and broken links | The destination of a redirect is listed; a 404 or 500 is reported, not listed. |
| Links with query strings | Usually sorted or filtered copies of another page. Include them if yours are distinct pages. |
| Other hosts, images, PDFs and feeds | A sitemap lists pages on its own host. Images and video have their own sitemap formats. |
Pages nothing links to cannot be found by any crawler, including this one. If an important page is missing from the result, link to it from somewhere on your site.
Why are there no priority or changefreq tags?
Because the search engines ignore them. Google says plainly: “Google ignores <priority> and <changefreq> values” (Google’s guide to building a sitemap), and Bing says the same (Bing’s July 2025 sitemap guidance). Generators that fill them in automatically, for example by lowering priority with page depth, add noise you would then have to maintain.
lastmod is different: Google uses it “if it’s consistently and verifiably accurate”. So the generator takes it from the page’s own dateModified or article:modified_time, or from the server’s Last-Modified header, and leaves it out when the server only reports the time of the request. The three tags explained covers why.
What does a sitemap look like?
sitemap.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2026-10-12</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/guides/stoneware-care</loc>
<lastmod>2026-09-30</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
What do you do with the file?
- Upload it to your site root, so it loads at
https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. A sitemap covers its own folder and below, so the root covers everything. - Point to it from robots.txt with a line such as
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, so every crawler can find it. The robots.txt generator adds the line for you. - Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. How to submit a sitemap walks through both.
- Check it with the sitemap validator, then regenerate it when you add or remove pages.
Frequently asked questions
Is the sitemap generator free?
Yes. A free crawl reads up to 500 pages, and you can run 3 crawls a day, with no account and no email. No copy of your pages is kept after the crawl.
Is there a free sitemap generator with unlimited pages?
Not here: a crawl reads up to 500 pages, because it fetches one page at a time and respects your robots.txt, and a larger crawl would take too long in a browser. For a bigger site, your CMS can usually build the sitemap itself, which also keeps it current, or you can split the site and combine the files in a sitemap index.
Does WordPress already make a sitemap?
Yes, since WordPress 5.5: a sitemap index at /wp-sitemap.xml while the site is public. It is turned off when the site is set to discourage search engines (WordPress 5.5 sitemaps). SEO plugins often replace it with their own.
Do I need a sitemap?
Not always. Google says a small site, which it defines as “about 500 pages or fewer”, that links to all its important pages may not need one (Google’s sitemaps overview). A sitemap helps most on large sites, new sites with few links pointing at them, and sites with many pages that are hard to reach by links.
Why is a page missing from my sitemap?
Most often because nothing links to it, or because it is noindex, blocked by robots.txt, or canonicalised to another page. Open “Pages left out” under the result to see each page that was found but not listed, with the reason.
Why do some pages have no lastmod?
The generator only writes a date the site itself provides. Many servers send the current time as Last-Modified on every request, which would make every page look changed today, so those dates are left out rather than guessed.
My site has more than 500 pages. What now?
The crawl stops at 500 and says so. A sitemap can hold up to 50,000 URLs (the sitemaps.org protocol), so for a larger site use your CMS or framework, which can build the full sitemap from its own database, or split the site into several sitemaps listed in a sitemap index.
Does it follow JavaScript links?
No. It reads the HTML your server sends and follows ordinary <a href> links. If your navigation only appears after JavaScript runs, search engines may have the same trouble finding those pages.