if you’re a frontend developer or been involved with seo writing, you’ve probably head about XML sitemaps. But what exactly are they, and why does your site need one? We’ll break it down for you.
What are XML Sitemaps?
An XML sitemap is essentially a roadmap of your website that tells search engines which pages exist and how it’s structured. Think of it as a list of important urls on your website formatted in such a way it makes it easy for crawlers like GoogleBot to get the information.
Humans navigate your website through clicking on buttons and links, search engines use sitemaps to discover the pages on your website.
What does a sitemap look like?
An XML sitemap follow a specific structure defined by the sitemap protocol, here’s an example:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://yourblog.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2025-09-28</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>Each URL entry in your sitemap includes several propertiees that provide additional context to search engines:
lastmod - tells the search engine wehn the page was last updated (last modified)
changefreq - how frequently the page content is likely to change, common values are: always, hourly, daily, or weekly.
priority - this indicates the relative importance of pages on your site, ranging fro 0.0 to 1.0. Your homepage might be 1.0, while less important pages might be 0.5
Why do websites need sitemaps?
While search engines can discover pages by crawling links, sitemaps offer several important benefits:
Faster Discoveranbility of New Content When you publish a new blog post, you want it to appear in search results as quickly as possible. A sitemap helps search engines find new pages faster than waiting for them to discover them.
Complete Coverage Some pages might be burried deep in your site structure or not linked from other pages. Sitemaps ensures that all your important content is discoverable
Metadata Sitemaps let you communicate important metdata, like the priority of the page.
How to make Google find your sitemap
Creating a sitemap is only half the battle. You need to tell search engines where to find your sitemap. There are two approaches:
Method 1: robots.txt File
This is the most common method for letting the search engines find you sitemap. robots.txt is a text file that should be located at the root of your domain.
Here’s an example of a robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourblog.com/sitemap.xmlMethod 2: Google Search Console
You can also manually submit your sitemap through Google Search Console:
Go to Google Search Console
Select your website or add it
Navigate to “sitemaps” on the left sidebar
Enter the path to your Sitemap URL (e.g sitemap.xml)
Click “submit”