Free Sitemap.xml Generator

Why every site needs a sitemap.xml

Google's crawler discovers most pages by following links. But for new sites, deep pages, or pages without strong internal links, a sitemap is the difference between getting indexed in days versus weeks. It's also the cleanest way to tell Google which URLs you consider canonical — preventing duplicate-content confusion when the same page is reachable via ?utm_source=... or trailing-slash variations.

For sites with 100+ pages, an accurate, frequently-updated sitemap is one of the highest-leverage technical SEO investments you can make. It's also one of the few SEO assets where "perfect" is reachable — unlike content or backlinks where there's always more to do, you can ship a clean sitemap once and revisit only when your URL structure changes.

Manual mode vs. Crawl mode

Manual mode (free, unlimited): paste a list of URLs you already know. Best when you have a tightly-curated set of canonical URLs — e.g., 50 product pages from your CMS export or a clean URL list from an internal report.

Crawl mode (Pro): paste a start URL, we BFS-walk your site, find every same-domain page, extract article:modified_time as lastmod, and optionally include image + hreflang extensions. Best for sites where you don't have a tidy URL list — most real sites, honestly. Saves hours vs running Screaming Frog locally.

Sitemap.xml hard limits

• 50,000 URLs per file — beyond that, split into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file (sitemap_index.xml referencing each sub-sitemap).
• 50 MB uncompressed per file — most sites never approach this.
• URLs must be absolute (full https://...) and use the same protocol + subdomain as your canonical domain. If your site is https://www.example.com, every sitemap URL must match — no bare example.com entries.
• Encoded as UTF-8, with reserved XML characters (& < > " ') properly escaped. We handle this for you.

What <priority> and <changefreq> actually do

Google has publicly stated they mostly ignore both fields — they prioritize crawl based on <lastmod>, internal-link structure, and their own scoring signals. But Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo still use them — covering ~5% of global search traffic. The cost of including priority + changefreq is near-zero (a few extra XML lines per URL) and the upside covers a meaningful long tail of non-Google traffic.

Practical defaults that don't lie to crawlers:

• Homepage + key landing pages → priority 1.0, changefreq weekly
• Blog posts + tool pages → priority 0.8, changefreq monthly
• Legal, contact, footer pages → priority 0.3, changefreq yearly

Image and hreflang extensions (Pro Crawl mode)

Image sitemap (xmlns:image="...sitemap-image/1.1"): adds an <image:image> child per URL listing every image on that page. Google Images uses this to discover images faster and rank them in image search. For ecommerce, recipe, travel, and product-photography sites, an image sitemap can double image-search traffic within 60-90 days.

Hreflang (xmlns:xhtml="...xhtml"): adds <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> per URL listing every language variant. Critical for multilingual sites — without it, Google may serve your English page to Hindi searchers (or vice versa), then demote your bounce-rate as a quality signal.

After you generate

1. Download the file as sitemap.xml.
2. Upload to your site's root — e.g., https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Add this line to your robots.txt:
   Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
4. In Google Search Console → Sitemaps → paste the URL → Submit. Google starts crawling within 24 hours typically.
5. Repeat in Bing Webmaster Tools (powers Bing + Yahoo + DuckDuckGo + ChatGPT search).
6. Re-submit the sitemap whenever you add 10+ new pages — keeps the indexing pipeline fresh.

What we don't do (yet)

• Video sitemap extension (xmlns:video="...") — on roadmap
• News sitemap extension (xmlns:news="...") — niche, low demand
• Automatic sitemap-index generation for 50K+ URL sites — coming with Pro Plus tier
• Auto-ping search engines on generate — coming with Pro tier