Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website, helping search engines discover, crawl, and understand the structure of your site.
Sitemaps come in two main forms: XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file (usually at /sitemap.xml) that tells search engines about every page on your site, when it was last updated, how often it changes, and its relative importance. This helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently.
While less critical for SEO than XML sitemaps, they help visitors navigate large websites and provide additional internal links that can improve crawlability. XML sitemaps are especially important for large websites (1,000+ pages), new websites without many backlinks, sites with deep page hierarchies, and sites with pages that aren't well-linked internally.
In practice
- A news website with 50,000 articles implemented an auto-updating XML sitemap and saw 30% more of their pages indexed within a month
- An e-commerce site with seasonal products used sitemap priority signals to ensure new collection pages were crawled within hours of launch
- A multi-location business created a separate sitemap for their 200 location pages, ensuring Google indexed every one within two weeks of launch
- A SaaS company discovered through Google Search Console that only 60% of their pages were indexed, submitting a complete sitemap resolved the issue within weeks
Not sure how this applies to you?
A senior engineer walks your site, your search presence and the way enquiries reach you, then writes down the three things worth fixing first. You keep the document either way.