As the name indicates, a sitemap is the map of your website presenting all your links with their structure. Once you publish new content, the link will be added to your sitemap letting search engines index and rank them. Without a sitemap, you have to wait for Google bots to find your site and index your pages.
There are two types of sitemaps, including HTML and XML sitemaps. While the former guide visitors on your site structure, the latter help crawlers find and index every page of your site.
When it comes to WordPress sitemap creation, you can either do it manually or use a plugin. If you’re non-techy and prefer automatic work, the plugin solution would be a perfect choice.
That’s why we’ve summarized and come up with the 6 best WordPress Google sitemap plugins to index your site faster. Their core features along with pros and cons will be presented in this post.
Top 6 WordPress Google Sitemap Plugins
In fact, you can manually write a new sitemap and send it off once adding content to your site. As we already mentioned above, this method wastes a lot of your precious time.
What if you’re a blogger and you publish 3 to 5 articles per day, you have to create a new sitemap and submit it daily. That’s why WordPress sitemap plugins were born to save you time and effort.
#1 All in One SEO Pack
Launched in 2007, All in One SEO is now trusted by over 3 million users around the world and proves the most common sitemap plugin for WordPress sites. Upon activation, the plugin will create an XML sitemap for your site.
Apart from the content sitemaps, AIOSEO offers sitemaps for other content types such as news and videos to improve your site SEO. It also comes with RSS SEO Sitemap for SEO crawl frequency improvement.
The plugin permits you to control the number of links on each sitemap, disable post types and taxonomies, exclude certain links, and tons more.
Pros:
- Improve website ranking with a comprehensive sitemap
- Provide tons of SEO features apart from sitemap
- Integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce, MemberPress, Elementor, and Facebooks, etc.
- Import SEO data from other SEO plugins such as Yoast or RankMath
Cons:
- There is a limit to the number of integrated page builders and membership plugins
#2 Yoast SEO
When talking about WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast should be the first name appearing in your mind. Actively installed on more than 11 million WordPress users, Yoast SEO has become the most common plugin in general and SEO plugin in particular of all time.
Yoast’s XML sitemap feature enables crawlers to understand and index your site better. Right after you add content or remove any page/post, it will automatically include or exclude it from the sitemap. Noindex post types won’t show up on the sitemap.
Besides sitemaps, Yoast comes with various features to improve your site SEO and create killer content. Its SEO analysis makes it easy for you to provide search engine-friendly content. The plugin also recommends what you should and shouldn’t do for greater content readability.
Pros:
- Offer advanced XML sitemap
- Analyze your content SEO and readability at the bottom of all posts
- Support numerous languages
Cons:
- Require the Premium version for automatically internal linking
- Need extensions for WooCommerce stores
#3 XML Sitemaps
Receiving a 4.9/5-star review, XML Sitemaps seems like the most favorable sitemap plugin at the moment. Unlike All in One SEO or Yoast, the plugin centers on XML sitemaps only, not SEO elements in general.
XML Sitemaps helps you create sitemaps for specific search engines, from Google, Bing to Yahoo and Ask.com. Since then, bots can easily see your site structure and index it. Every time you create new content, it notifies search engines right off the bat.
Plus, since version 4, the plugin frees you from manually creating sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files. Instead, it will attempt to rename these files to sitemap.xml.bak.
Pros:
- Support all WordPress pages, posts, and custom post types
- Not affect your site speed
Cons:
- The UI is not user-friendly
#4 Google XML Sitemap Generator
Although Google XML Sitemap Generator is not as popular as the other 3 plugins above, it proves one of the best sitemap solutions for WordPress site owners. The plugin creates XML, HTML, RSS Feeds sitemaps for your site.
No matter which search engines you want to have your content indexed and ranked on, Google XML Sitemap Generator helps them understand your site structure effortlessly. Your content will be indexed and ranked on Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and many other search engines.
Along with the content sitemap, the plugin supports news and image sitemap format as well. As a result, not only pages and posts but also other content types can rank better on search engines.
The Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin gives you the right to adjust your default sitemap. In other words, you’re able to add taxonomies or post types to it. Similar to XML Sitemaps, you can also enable automatic notifications to crawlers when having any new content on your site.
Pros:
- Work well with WooCommerce, bbPress, and BuddyPress
- Edit your sitemap with ease
- Add sitemap entries to the robots.txt file
- Support image and news sitemaps
Cons:
- XML sitemap indexed file sometimes redirects to a 404 error or homepage when upgrading
#5 Sitemap by click5
Sitemap by click5 receives more than 6K active installations and there is no 1, 2, or 3-star review from their users.
Sitemap by click5 lends you a helping hand in generating and customizing your HTML and XML sitemaps. You don’t have to worry about including custom post types in your sitemap, from WooCommerce product pages to pages created from other plugins.
On top of that, you can sort backlinks and add custom links to the sitemap. It lets you exclude certain pages from the sitemap via the Backlist feature too.
Pros:
- Support custom post types and WooCommerce products
- Not require the premium version
- Make it easy to set up and navigate
- Provide quick support
Cons:
- Suitable for someone looking for a simple sitemap solution only
- Offer little knowledge base or documentation for users to reference
#6 WP Sitemap Page
WP Sitemap Page doesn’t generate an XML sitemap for your site as other plugins. That’s suck! So what does it offer?
The plugin allows you to list out all your pages and posts on a page via a shortcode. The page will function in the same way as a sitemap. You just need to add [wp_sitemap_page] on any of your pages.
While other XML sitemap plugins serve search engines, this plugin creates a site structure for humans. Users can navigate your site or find previously published pages/posts quickly.
Pros:
- Customize the sitemap using CSS
- Exclude certain pages, posts, and custom post types from the sitemap
Cons:
- Come with an outdated UI
- Not help with SEO ranking improvement
- Use the shortcode to create a sitemap
Which Is Your Ideal WordPress Sitemap Plugin?
XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine bots to read, crawl, and index your site better. This creates better SEO results for your site rankings.
It’s highly recommended to use a plugin to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress site. We’ve shown you the most well-known plugins with their main features, advantages, and disadvantages.
While AIO SEO and Yoast SEO offer various general SEO features, the rest concentrates on XML and HTML sitemaps. You can add custom post types, include or exclude specific pages from the sitemap with the help of these plugins.
How about protected pages on your site? You definitely want to remove them from the sitemap to prevent search engines from indexing and showing them up. For more information, check out this guide on 5 ways to remove pages from your sitemap.
