The free XML Sitemap Generator builds a sitemap for your website by crawling your pages. Enter your site's address and the tool follows the links across your site, collects the pages it finds, and assembles them into a valid XML sitemap you can download. Submit that sitemap to search engines to help them discover and index your content. It is free and needs no account.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists the pages on your website in a format search engines read. It does not change how your pages look; it simply gives crawlers a clear map of your site so they can find everything you want indexed, including pages that might be hard to reach through links alone.
How to Generate a Sitemap
- Enter your website. Type your site's address to start.
- Crawl. The tool crawls your pages, following links to discover them. This can take a little time on a larger site.
- Download. Get the generated XML sitemap file.
- Submit it. Upload the sitemap to your site and submit it through Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, and reference it in your robots.txt.
Why a Sitemap Helps
Search engines find pages by following links, but that process can miss pages that are new, deep in your site, or not well linked. A sitemap gives crawlers a direct list of the pages you want them to know about, which helps them discover your content more completely and more quickly. It is especially useful for larger sites, new sites without many inbound links, and sites with pages that are not easy to reach by clicking through. A sitemap does not guarantee every page is indexed, but it makes discovery far more reliable.
A Note on Crawl Limits
Because this tool crawls your site live and free, it works within sensible depth and size limits so a single crawl does not run indefinitely on a very large site. For most sites this captures your pages fully. For a very large site that exceeds the limit, the sitemap will include the pages crawled up to that point, which you can still submit while generating additional coverage as needed.
When to Generate a Sitemap
- Launching a site. Give search engines a full map of a new site with few inbound links.
- Adding content. Help crawlers find newly published pages quickly.
- Improving indexing. Make sure deep or poorly linked pages can be discovered.
- Submitting to search engines. Produce the sitemap file Search Console and Bing ask for.
Related SEO Tools
Pair your sitemap with a robots.txt file that points to it. You can also generate meta tags for your pages or run an SEO score check.
