What’s a Sitemap? And Where Can I Find My Sitemap in WordPress?
A sitemap is nothing but a list of indexable pages on a website. The one that is formatted for search engines to help their web crawlers to find all the URLs on a domain is the most common type of sitemap that is typically referred to in SEO. HTML sitemaps can also exist as pages on a site and are mainly aimed to assist human users by giving them a listing of pages for accessing all from a single location. Also, You can check our How To Add Social Login To WordPress blog.
How You Can Find Your Sitemap
Check The Common Locations
Typically, the sitemap .xml file is located in the root directory of your domain. Anything can be the file name as defined by the webmaster. The file can live anywhere that is accessible publicly on the domain of the website. They can be placed in a sub-folder which is done for hiding a sitemap from your competitors as they might seek an easy way to discover all of the URLs on the domain.
You will be able to access the file directory of your website through FTP to look where the sitemap xml file might be located if this is your domain. In case you don’t have access to your website’s files directly, you can always try and type some common name conventions for the sitemaps in your web browser to see if there are any active files that you can access. Examples for where can I find my sitemap in WordPress?
https://www.websitedomain.com/sitemap.xml
https://websitedomain.com/sitemap_index.xml
https://www.websitedomain.com/sitemap1.xml
Check The Robots.txt
All websites should be having a robots.txt for providing directives to bots and web crawlers. What this file typically includes is a link to the sitemap for helping search engines to locate the sitemap file with quick effect to start crawling.
Usually, you can locate the robots.txt directly under the main site directory. That is:
https://www.websitedomain.com/robots.txt
You may try this for any domain. If a sitemap is declared, you are going to see a line entry as:
Sitemap: http://www.websitedomain.com/sitemap.xml
Using The Advanced Search Operators
Here’s a another option for where can I find my sitemap in WordPress? A number of advanced search operators are available to help you to refine your Google search.
In case there is a sitemap on a domain that is not in the standard location or declared in the robot.txt, then this is your best bet to locate the sitemaps that are located and indexed by Google.
Here are 2 ways to search a domain for xml sitemaps. Try tying one of these in Google and see if you are getting any results:
site:websitedomain.com filetype:xml
site:websitedomain.com ext:xml
If you are getting a lot of pages and files that seem irrelevant to you, you can qualify your search further by adding the following:
site:websitedomain.com filetype:xml inurl:sitemap
site:websitedomain.com ext:xml inurl:sitemap
This is going to look for XML files on your domain having the word ‘sitemap’ included in the sub-folder directory or the filename.
Using a Tool ( For ex, Google Search Console)
If there is already a Google Search Console property set up for the website you own, you just need to log in to see if there is a sitemap declared that Google is already crawling.
There are other tools as well that crawl the web and give tools to check domains for sitemaps. SEO Site Checkup includes a sitemap tool which is very easy to use.
Checking Your CMS
In case you are utilizing a common CMS, then it is possible that it is automatically generating a sitemap for you. You need to check the documentation depending on your CMS to see if there are many details available on the sitemaps.
We have included some information regarding WordPress CMS below:
Where Can I Find My Sitemap In WordPress
There is no built-in functionality for auto-generating sitemaps in WordPress. However, there are a lot of plugins that give you this feature. Some of the commonly used plugins are Yoast SEO and Google XML Sitemaps.
As plugins are not install by default, this is not relevant to new sites but for those who have these plugins install for additional functionality. In order to find what plugins are install on your WP website, in the admin section of WordPress, click the ‘Plugins’ link in the left-hand navigation.
If you have ‘Yoast SEO’ as an active plugin, you will find an ‘SEO’ link in the left sidebar, and you will also be able to see Sitemaps under the ‘XML Sitemaps’ sublink. You will typically find them in standard locations/filenames unless these plugins are specifically configured for placing sitemaps in specific directories.
Apart from plugins, you can also check any custom theme settings, ‘Tools’ and ‘Settings’, and also look for any XML or Sitemap settings. Whenever in doubt, refer to the documentation.
Conclusion
With all the above ways, now you know where can I find my sitemap in WordPress. Especially for WordPress users, we have separately added how to find a sitemap in WordPress. Hope this post has answered your question about where I can find my sitemap in WordPress.
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