What Is a Sitemap Generator?
A sitemap generator creates an XML file listing all important URLs on your website for search engine crawlers. Instead of relying on crawlers to discover every page through links, a sitemap directly tells Google, Bing, and other engines exactly which pages exist, when they were updated, and their relative importance.
Sitemap Best Practices
- → Include only canonical URLs. Don't list duplicate pages, paginated variants, or URLs blocked by robots.txt.
- → Keep it under 50,000 URLs. That's the sitemap protocol limit. For larger sites, use a sitemap index file.
- → Update lastmod dates. Only change lastmod when page content actually changes — don't auto-update daily.
- → Reference in robots.txt. Add Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt file.
How to Use This Sitemap Generator
- Enter your URLs — List the pages on your website, or enter your domain to auto-crawl and discover pages.
- Set priority and frequency — Assign a priority (0.0–1.0) and change frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) to each URL.
- Configure the format — Choose XML sitemap format (standard for search engines) or HTML sitemap (for users).
- Download the sitemap — Save the sitemap.xml file and upload it to your site's root directory.
Worked example: which limit you hit first, and which tags matter
A sitemap may hold 50,000 URLs or 50 MB uncompressed, whichever comes first. This site's own sitemap is a useful yardstick: 782 URLs with a <lastmod> each take 133,658 bytes, about 171 bytes per entry. At that rate 50,000 URLs come to roughly 8.5 MB, so for ordinary URLs the count limit binds long before the size limit; you would need entries of about 1,000 bytes (very long URLs, or image and hreflang extensions) to reach 50 MB first. Past either limit, split the URLs across several sitemaps and submit a sitemap index that lists them.
This generator can write <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority>. Google's documentation says it ignores <priority> and <changefreq>, and uses <lastmod> only when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. So leave the first two blank unless another search engine you care about reads them, and only set lastmod to the date a page's content really changed: a sitemap that stamps every URL with today's date on each rebuild teaches Google to disregard it.
Sources, checked October 11, 2026: Google Search Central, Build and submit a sitemap; sitemaps.org protocol; byte count measured on ultimatedesigntools.com/sitemap.xml.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Related Article How to Generate an XML Sitemap →Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools