What are XML sitemaps?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all. It also helps search engines understand your website structure. You want Google to crawl every essential page of your website. But sometimes, pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. A sitemap can help speed up content discovery.
What websites need an XML sitemap?
Google’s documentation says sitemaps are beneficial for “really large websites,” for “websites with large archives,” for “new websites with just a few external links to it,” and for “websites which use rich media content.”
While we agree that these kinds of websites will definitely benefit the most from having one, at Yoast, we think XML sitemaps are beneficial for every website. Every single website needs Google to be able to find the most important pages easily and to know when they’re last updated. That’s why this feature is included in the Yoast SEO plugin.
