How to create a sitemap for your website

What a website sitemap is and its purpose

A website sitemap is exactly what it sounds like: a map of your website, outlining each published page, post, and archive type. You can think of it like having a tour guide pointing out each area of a website, and how these pages are interconnected.

There are (3) main types of website sitemaps: Content Strategy, Webpage, and XML.

1. Content Strategy Sitemaps

During the Discovery and Strategy Phases of your project you have to determine the “rooms” of your website. This refers to the overall site navigation: how many pages, their naming convention, what type of content to expect on each page, etc.

A simple navigational sitemap can look like this:

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2. Webpage Sitemaps

Once your website has been designed and developed you can opt to include a webpage for a sitemap. This is where you would manually or dynamically include a list of the pages and/or posts published on your website, all in one place.

A webpage sitemap may look something like this:

See an example of a webpage sitemap on my website.

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3. XML Sitemaps

A XML sitemap is a generated file that can be reached via URL wherein search engines get directions to the various pages of your website. It will look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/example.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-03-19</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

By submitting an XML sitemap to Google you are essentially inviting them to scan and index the URLs contained within.

This isn’t a necessary step; Google will typically still index your website without submitting a sitemap, but doing so allows you to monitor accordingly.

How to create your website sitemaps

How to create a content sitemap

As the easiest sitemap to create, outlining your plans for navigation and content can be done in a variety of ways:

1. Paper and pen
2. Spreadsheet or document
3. Apps or software

In reality a content sitemap is only meant for you or your content specialist, web designer, and web developer. Content sitemaps aren’t public-facing, but an internal planning tool.

Main Navigation

Each website has a main navigation area in its header, the section that displays at the top of every page, usually including a logo and menu links.

Here, you want to think about the most important top-level pages of your site, the areas that visitors will look for the most.

Depending on the amount of content your site has you may also need to plan out child pages that are nested below the main parent pages that are featured in the menu. These are what make up drop-down menus, or secondary menu links.

For example, on be3designs.ca my main navigation menu links are: Meet Bree, Resources, Website Services, and Contact.

As I have more than 1 service offering, secondary child pages are in a drop-down menu.

Secondary Navigation

In addition to the main navigation, some websites also have secondary menus. These additional page links may appear in a top bar above the header, below the header, in an on-page sidebar menu, or in the footer.

When planning your website content you’ll need to figure out what pages you need, what content is featured on each of these pages, and how these pages relate to one another.

1. Think about what you want your website to say,
2. Organize your content into topics or categories,
3. Start building out the concept of each page by naming them and mapping them out in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation, and
4. You now have your content sitemap!

If you need to work more visually than you can with pen and paper or a spreadsheet, you can try using a visual workspace like Miro, or a Kanban Board-like tool through something like Notion, Trello, or Planner if you already use Microsoft 365.

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How to create a webpage sitemap

You may still have more pages or posts beyond what is linked to in the main and secondary menus. If you have a larger site, a webpage sitemap can come in handy.

This type of sitemap IS public-facing as its purpose is to help visitors find content that may not be readily available in the main or secondary navigation menus.

To do this you’ll need to create a new page on your website, not unlike existing static pages.

1. Name your page Sitemap, with a permalink of /sitemap/.
2. Include your page title and a brief description.
3. If you’re on WordPress you may have a built-in element or tool to automatically pull each existing page on-site into a hyperlinked list, or you can type out a manual list of your site pages. Make sure your text links out to each corresponding page.
4. If you don’t have too many blog posts, you can list these out too but if you have too many to list on the page try including a category and/or tag list that links out to blog post topics instead.
5. Consider adding a search bar to this page too so that visitors can search by term if they still can’t find what they’re looking for.

Here is an example of my sitemap webpage on be3designs.ca to give you an idea of what this all looks like in practice.

When you’ve created your Sitemap webpage, you can link to it from your footer as a secondary or tertiary link, (often seen added to the same line as copyright or privacy policy text).

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How to create a XML sitemap

You ask: How do I create a sitemap for my website using popular website builders? I answer: You probably already have one! Find out if you do, depending on the website platform you’re using:

If your website is built on WordPress

If you are using WordPress you likely already have a sitemap URL up and running! XML Sitemap functionality was added to WordPress core in version 5.5 in 2020.

Try this: Go to your domain and append this to the end of your URL: /sitemap_index.xml

If a page shows up that looks something like the screenshot included above, or a page of code similar to what I showed you earlier, you’ve got yourself a sitemap!

You may even have more than one sitemap, with the index version showing a list of all the other existing sitemaps:

• Post Sitemap
• Page Sitemap
• Category Sitemap
• Tag Sitemap
• Local Sitemap
• Image Sitemap

If you don’t see anything come up when you search for your WordPress XML URL, try reaching out to your website host to see if the SimpleXML PHP extension is turned on within the server settings.

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If your website is built on Squarespace

Squarespace also automatically generates a Sitemap page for your website. Try going to your domain and append this to the end of your URL: /sitemap.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://www.example.com/example.html</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-03-19</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

You should see the code-version of your XML file which will list the URLs of all pages on your website, and image metadata. Squarespace automatically updates your sitemap with any pages you add or remove, with changes appearing between 1-24 hours.

You can’t make changes to your Squarespace sitemap or a page’s source code but you can use other settings in your account to add SEO information like HTML heading tags.

Keep in mind that if your website is set to private or password protected, your sitemap won’t load.

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If your website is built on Shopify

All Shopify stores automatically generate a XML Sitemap file that contains links to all your products, primary product image, pages, collections, and blog posts.

Try going to your domain and append this at the end of your URL: /sitemap.xml

If your store is on the Basic plan or higher, then you have sitemaps for every additional domain you’re using for international domains.

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If your website is built on Wix

Wix sites automatically come with a sitemap index that contains separate sitemaps for each of your page types. Go to your domain and append this at the end of your URL: /sitemap.xml to see your sitemap index.

If you’re using additional tools like Wix Events, Bookings, Stores, etc. these will all be featured in their own sitemap archives.

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If your website is static (non-CMS)

If you’re running a static HTML website you’ll need to create your own XML file for your sitemap. You can do this using a sitemap generator tool or even by manually creating the file.

How to use a generator to create an XML sitemap file

Online tools or software can crawl your site and generate an XML sitemap based on the data it retrieves. After downloading this file, renaming it sitemap.xml if it isn’t already, you can then upload it to your website’s root directory via FTP or your hosting server’s file manager, and confirm it’s working by visiting yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml .

You can expect free tools to give you up to 500 pages total before you would need to upgrade to a premium service.

1. XML-Sitemaps.com: Enter your domain and it will start a scan of your website, giving you the option to download your XML sitemap file once completed.
   OR
2. Screaming Frog SEO: Download the SEO spider (free or paid), once the software is open type your website address and hit enter/start. After your site is fully crawled select XML Sitemap from the drop-down menu that appears under the top level menu item for Sitemaps, select your configuration options, and download your XML sitemap file.

💡 Tip: Using an online generator is the faster and easier way to get your XML sitemap, but SEO software may include other functionality that you’ll find helpful such as finding site structure issues, broken links, or accessibility recommendations. If you’re using a similar service check to see if it already has a sitemap option!

How to manually create an XML sitemap file

If you have a very small site, and some experience with using FTP and editing your robots.txt file, you can create a simple sitemap XML file using a text editor like Notepad.

You’ll start the XML file by setting the protocol standard, which can be copied and pasted below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
</urlset>

Then, you’ll need to create a <url> block with at least the mandatory <loc> tag for each page that you want to be indexed by search engines, like so:

<url>
  <loc>https://yourdomain.com</loc>
</url>

Each page’s <url> block will need to be contained within the <urlset> container, once completed a 3 page sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
  <loc>https://yourdomain.com</loc>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://yourdomain.com/about.html</loc>
</url>
<url>
  <loc>https://yourdomain.com/services.html</loc>
</url>
</urlset>

Save this file as sitemap.xml (with UTF-8 encoding) and upload it to the root directory of your website (where you find your index.html, not within any subfolders).

As a last step you also need to edit your robots.txt file by adding a line to include your sitemap URL. Open this file (also located in your root directory) and add the following line:

Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Once saved, visit this link in a browser to confirm that it is working. Then, you’ll replace this file as you have more page URLs to update.

How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

If you want to know how Google interprets your website from a technical POV, you can connect it to a Search Console profile and get insights related to indexing.

Once your XML sitemap(s) have been created, Search Console has an area where you can submit them directly to Google. This isn’t a mandatory step and as long as your website is set to index you don’t necessarily need to submit a sitemap as the search engine bots will eventually crawl your site.

Submitting a sitemap though, like a party invitation, may result in faster indexing. This can be helpful to brand new websites that have few to no external links to it.

Here is my previous tutorial for How to create a Search Console Account. Once your profile is set-up and verified, you’ll find the Sitemaps area here: https://search.google.com/search-console/sitemaps. If you have more than one website profile set-up you can select from the drop-down in the top left menu, below the Google Search Console logo.

That’s it for this tutorial on how to create a sitemap for your website!