sitemap.xml Generator
Generate a valid XML sitemap from your list of URLs.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
What does the generator put in each entry?
Every non-empty line becomes one url entry with a loc tag. Spaces at either end of a line are trimmed, blank lines are skipped, and the label above the box shows how many URLs were found. The change frequency and priority you choose apply to every URL in the file, and the Include today's lastmod box stamps all of them with the same date. Copy puts the XML on your clipboard, and Download saves it as sitemap.xml. The file is built in your browser.
Characters that XML reserves are escaped for you. Paste https://example.com/shop?category=shoes&sort=new and the output reads <loc>https://example.com/shop?category=shoes&sort=new</loc>. That & is required, because a bare & makes the whole file invalid XML. Quotes and apostrophes in a URL are escaped the same way, as " and '.
Does Google use changefreq, priority and lastmod?
Google's documentation says it ignores changefreq and priority, so the two menus make no difference in Google Search. Lastmod is used when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. Ticking Include today's lastmod marks every URL as changed today, which is only true if every page changed today. If you regenerate the file often without editing pages, untick the box or add real dates to the pages that changed.
The date comes from your device clock in UTC. Just after midnight in a time zone ahead of UTC, such as India's, the stamp can still show the previous day.
Which mistakes does the generator not catch?
The tool does not validate what you paste. A relative line such as /about goes into the file as <loc>/about</loc>, but sitemap URLs must be absolute, with the protocol and domain. Duplicates also stay in, so clean a long list with Remove Duplicate Lines first. Keep every URL on the same protocol and host as the sitemap itself, without mixing http and https or www and non-www versions.
Escaping covers XML characters only. A space or other unsafe character in a path must already be percent-encoded, so a space has to appear as %20; copying the address from your browser's address bar usually gives you that encoded form.
A single sitemap file can list at most 50,000 URLs and be at most 50 MB uncompressed. The generator writes one file and no sitemap index, so a larger site needs several files and an index that lists them. Once the file is live, robots.txt Generator can add the Sitemap line that points crawlers to it.