Free XML Sitemap Generator
A five-page business site with no CMS
Picture a small consultancy with a hand-built website: a home page, an about page, a services page, a case studies page and a contact page. There is no WordPress, no plugin, and nothing to generate a sitemap automatically. That is exactly where this tool earns its keep. You list the five addresses, choose a date, and get a valid sitemap.xml in a few seconds. The same approach works for landing pages on a static host, a documentation site, or a campaign microsite.
Step by step
- Paste your page URLs, one per line, using full addresses that start with https.
- Choose how to handle the last modified date: leave it out, use today, or pick a date.
- Optionally set change frequency and priority. They are not needed.
- Click Download sitemap.xml, or copy the XML.
- Upload the file to the root folder of the site so it is available at
yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. - Add a
Sitemap:line to your robots.txt and submit the address in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Deciding which URLs belong in it
A sitemap is a list of pages you want found, not a list of every address that exists. Include your real content pages, one address per page, in the version you want shown in search. Leave out pages that redirect, pages blocked or marked noindex, duplicates reachable under several addresses, login and cart pages, and internal search results. A shorter, cleaner sitemap is more useful than a long, untidy one. Remove duplicate lines from your list first with the remove duplicate lines tool.
The optional fields, explained honestly
- lastmod is the date the page’s content last meaningfully changed. Google uses it when it proves reliable, so only set it if you will keep it honest.
- changefreq hints at how often a page changes. Google ignores it.
- priority was meant to rank your pages against each other. Google ignores it too, and setting everything to 1.0 means nothing.
Other search engines may read them, so they are harmless, but you lose nothing by leaving them out.
Keeping it up to date by hand
A hand-made sitemap goes stale. When you add a page, add its line and upload the new file. When you remove a page, remove its line. A sitemap that lists pages that no longer exist sends crawlers to error pages, which wastes their time and can lower their trust in the file. A simple habit helps: keep your URL list in a text file, and regenerate the sitemap whenever you change the site. If you often add pages, a CMS or a plugin that updates the sitemap for you is worth switching to.
Sitemap or good internal links?
A sitemap helps search engines discover pages, but it does not replace linking. A page that nothing links to is hard to understand and unlikely to be treated as important, even if it is in the sitemap. Make sure every page you list is reachable from your navigation or from other pages, and think of the sitemap as a safety net, not a substitute.
A template you can reuse
For a small static site, keep one plain text file called urls.txt with one address per line. Whenever you add or remove a page, edit the list, paste it into the generator and download the new sitemap. Upload it over the old one and resubmit in Search Console only if something major changed. This takes about two minutes and keeps the sitemap honest.
Common upload problems
- The file was uploaded to a subfolder instead of the root.
- The address in the browser shows a download or an error, not the XML.
- The server serves the file with the wrong type or compresses it badly.
- The sitemap lists http addresses while the site uses https.
Open the live file, run it through the validator, and check Search Console’s message for details.
Check it before you submit
Run the finished file through the XML sitemap validator, which catches broken XML, relative addresses, bad dates and duplicates. Then open the live file in a browser to confirm the upload worked. If your site is large, uses WordPress or an SEO plugin that already builds a sitemap index, do not make a second one here, because two competing sitemaps cause duplicates.
FAQ
It is a file that lists the URLs on your site in a format search engines can read, to help them discover your pages.
Not directly. It helps search engines find and crawl your pages, especially on new sites or sites with few internal links.
In the root folder of your website, then submit its URL in Google Search Console.
No. They are optional and Google ignores them.
No. The file is generated in your browser.