XML Sitemap Generator

What is a website sitemap, and why does it matter?

A website sitemap is simply a map of every page you want search engines to find. Underneath that plain description sits a standard XML file: a list of URLs, each one wrapped with a few small tags that tell crawlers roughly how important a page is, how often it tends to change, and when it was last touched. Search engines aren't obligated to follow any of these hints, but in practice a clean sitemap makes it far easier for Googlebot and Bingbot to notice new pages quickly, especially on larger sites where internal linking alone doesn't surface everything.

That's the gap a sitemap generator like this one is meant to close. If you already run a sitemap builder as part of your CMS, you may only need this occasionally — after a migration, a redesign, or when you inherit a site with no sitemap at all. If you don't, this tool covers both situations people usually land in. Maybe you want to generate a website sitemap by simply typing in a domain and letting the crawler do the walking, following internal links the way a search engine would. Or maybe you already maintain your own list of URLs, exported from a CMS or pulled from analytics, and just need a sitemap maker that turns that list into valid XML without re-crawling anything.

The "generate sitemap xml" workflow here is intentionally split for that reason. Option one is a real crawl: it starts at your homepage, follows same-domain links it finds in the HTML, and keeps going until it hits the page limit you set or runs out of new links to follow. It checks robots.txt first, skips disallowed paths, and ignores binary files like images or PDFs that don't belong in a page sitemap. Option two skips crawling entirely — if you already have the URLs, there's no reason to wait on a crawler, so that path runs instantly in your browser.

Both paths converge on the same output: a sitemap.xml file with loc, lastmod, changefreq and priority tags for every URL. Priority and changefreq aren't guesses pulled from nowhere — they're calculated from how deep a URL sits in your site's folder structure, on the reasonable assumption that a homepage usually matters more than a page four directories deep. You can override any of that manually if your own judgment differs, which is common for sites where a specific landing page or product category deserves more crawl attention than its URL depth would suggest.

People often ask how to open svg file formats or other visual assets in the context of a sitemap, and the honest answer is that they generally shouldn't be in one at all — sitemaps are for indexable HTML pages, not images, fonts, or vector graphics, which is why this tool filters those extensions out automatically during a crawl rather than cluttering your file with entries no search engine will index anyway.

Once you create sitemap xml output here, the next step happens outside this page: upload the file to your site's root directory (so it's reachable at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml), then submit it through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. From there, both platforms will periodically re-fetch the file, compare it against what they've already indexed, and use any new or changed URLs as a signal for where to crawl next. It won't force indexing on its own, but it removes one common reason pages get missed.

A sitemap is one of those pieces of technical SEO that's easy to postpone because a site can function without one, right up until a section of pages quietly never gets indexed. Keeping the file current, whether by re-running a crawl after major changes or updating your URL list as you publish, is a small habit that pays off in fewer indexing surprises down the line.