XML sitemap generation for WordPress
Sitemap Generator Pro creates an XML sitemap for your WordPress website by using an external service to crawl the site. The crawler visits pages like a normal visitor, which keeps the computation cost for your web server low. This approach can be useful on shared hosting, where generating a sitemap locally may affect available resources. Sites hosted on dedicated servers may already have enough capacity to generate sitemaps on the server.
The generator is designed to work out of the box with WordPress plugins. It can add nearly all indexable file types to the sitemap, including examples such as PDF, XLS, and DOC files. The crawler also respects your robots.txt file and its crawl-delay directive, supports robots noindex meta elements, and can be controlled with the MB-SiteCrawler user-agent.
Pro sitemap features
The Pro edition adds support for specialized media sitemaps:
- Image sitemaps: Generate sitemaps for images included in your website content.
- Video sitemaps: Create video sitemaps for supported HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos.
These capabilities extend the standard XML sitemap beyond ordinary pages and indexable documents. They can be useful for websites that publish visual content, embedded videos, or media-rich articles and want those resources represented in their sitemap data.
Practical workflow
After installation, the external crawler visits the pages of your website and generates the sitemap. Because the crawling is handled externally, visitors do not need to share your web server’s resources with the generation process in the same way as a locally running crawler. Once generation has finished, access sitemap.xml and check that the contents are correct for your site.
The free version is limited to websites with up to 500 URLs and does not include image or video support. Sitemap Generator Pro is intended for the additional media sitemap capabilities described above. The supplied information does not specify a separate URL limit for Pro.
Installation and requirements
Before installing, verify that the hosting environment provides cURL 7.18.1 or higher and OpenSSL 0.9.8f or higher. Current PHP versions supported by WordPress should provide a compatible cURL version in most hosting environments.
If an existing sitemap.xml file is present in the WordPress root directory, the generated file will overwrite it. Back up the existing file before using the generator. Windows webspace has not been tested according to the supplied information. After generation, review sitemap.xml to confirm that everything is correct.
