Does your website need a sitemap? Learn more here.

Key quotes:

• "Sitemaps are usually XML (Extensible Markup Language) Files that list out URLs on your site."
• "A crawler such as Googlebot still utilizes Sitemaps to help discover content, and understand your site better."
• "There are rules that you need to know about Sitemaps! It’s relatively simple to setup a Sitemap in WordPress since there are many plugins to do so."
• "For example, the plugin “Simple XML Sitemap Generator” is anything but simple."
• "I noticed on a client site of mine that this plugin was creating multiple sub-sitemaps for no good reason."
• "But creating more than necessary is not a good thing… Sites with only a few dozen pages don’t need a Sitemap that is split up into more than 3 or 4 different sub-sitemaps."

Key quotes:

• "Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless."
• "An XML sitemap contains all important pages of a site to help Google determine the structure of it: The XML sitemap above shows the XML sitemap of the Yoast website, which the Yoast SEO plugin created."
• "This is beneficial for SEO because you want Google to crawl your updated content fast."
• "In this case, the tag pages could also be set to ‘noindex, follow’ because you don’t want people to land on those URLs from the search results."
• "The XML sitemap of Yoast is added to Google Search Console As you can see in the image, adding your XML sitemap can be helpful to check whether all pages in your sitemap are really indexed by Google."
• "You can find it by clicking on ‘XML Sitemaps’ in the sidebar of your WordPress install: Now you’ve read this complete post, you know it’s important to have an XML sitemap, because having one can help your site’s SEO."

Key quotes:

• "A sitemap is a list of your website pages that lets search engines know what type of content resides on your website."
• "You should list all of your website pages that you would like to be indexed by search engines."
• "(You can also embed a sitemap into your website manually.) XML sitemaps tell search engines which pages to index."
• "There are XML sitemap generators that will help you save time when creating a sitemap."
• "According to Moz, you can save time by having a dynamic XML sitemap instead of trying to manually add urls and manage all your pages individually."
• "Using Google Search Console, you can track your website crawl errors, create a sitemap for your website, and submit a sitemap to Google."

Key quotes:

• "But many teams fail to see the benefits of incorporating sitemap building into their project planning strategy."
• "Building a sitemap from the get-go and using it to properly vet updates will improve the quality of your website planning and ultimately the quality of your user experience."
• "Websites are mapped out in entirety, taking into account navigation, content, flow, user experience, etc., before any actual design takes place."
• "With the user in mind, teams must ensure that visitors are able to quickly grasp the purpose of each page while seamlessly navigating the website to the content most relevant to their needs."
• "Sitemaps can be visual or text-based, but they must show the connections between a website’s pages and its content."
• "These 2D representations allow designers and developers to quickly understand a website’s structure and, consequently, to make informed decisions about the site."