Why generate a WordPress sitemap externally?
WordPress is the world's most popular CMS, and most WP site owners default to using a plugin like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or All in One SEO to generate their XML sitemap. These plugins do work — but they come with hidden costs that an external sitemap generator avoids entirely.
Every active plugin adds load to your WordPress install. Sitemap generation in particular runs queries against your wp_posts table, often invalidating caches and slowing down page rendering. On larger sites, plugin-generated sitemaps can also conflict with caching layers like WP Rocket, Cloudflare Cache, or Varnish, leading to stale or empty sitemaps being served to Googlebot.
An external sitemap generator like SitemapMaker.net produces a static sitemap.xml file that you upload directly to your server. There is zero runtime cost on every page load, no cache invalidation, and no plugin compatibility risk. For performance-conscious WordPress site owners, this is a meaningful upgrade.
What WordPress URLs does the crawler discover?
Our crawler treats your WordPress site like any other website — it follows internal links from your homepage outward. This means it discovers:
- All published posts linked from your blog index, archives, and category pages
- All published pages linked from menus, footers, or other pages
- Custom post types (portfolio, products, events, etc.) — as long as they have public archive or single-page links
- Category, tag, and author archives — included unless you exclude them
- WooCommerce product, category, and shop pages for e-commerce stores
- Custom taxonomies linked from your site
Pages that exist in WordPress but are not linked from any public page (orphans) will not be discovered — but those pages have bigger SEO problems anyway.
How to install your generated sitemap on WordPress
The process takes about two minutes:
- Generate — Use the form above with your WordPress site URL (e.g.
https://yourblog.com/). - Download — Click the download button to get the
sitemap.xmlfile. - Upload via FTP or hosting File Manager — Place the file in the root directory of your WordPress install (the same folder as
wp-config.phpandindex.php). - Disable plugin sitemap (optional) — If you use Yoast or Rank Math, you can disable their sitemap module from the plugin settings to prevent duplicate URLs.
- Submit to Google — In Search Console, submit
https://yourblog.com/sitemap.xml.
Excluding WordPress-specific URLs
WordPress generates several URL patterns that you almost never want in a sitemap. Use the exclusion field above to skip:
/wp-admin/— admin area, blocked by robots.txt anyway but worth excluding/wp-login.php— login page/wp-content/— uploads and theme files/feed/and/comments/feed/— RSS feeds?p=— old-style permalink redirects/page/2,/page/3, etc. — pagination unless you specifically want it/tag/or/author/— if you find these dilute your index?replytocom=,?share=— comment and sharing query strings
WooCommerce-specific tips
If you run a WooCommerce store, a few additional considerations apply:
- Exclude faceted URLs — patterns like
?orderby=,?filter_,?attribute_create infinite URL variations that you do not want indexed. - Set product pages to higher priority — these are your money pages. Use 0.8 for product pages and 0.6 for category pages.
- Regenerate weekly — inventory changes, new products, and seasonal campaigns benefit from frequent sitemap refreshes.
- Submit category sitemap separately — for very large stores (10,000+ products), the auto-generated sitemap index splits cleanly by URL count.
Compatibility with popular plugins
Our external sitemap works alongside any WordPress plugin:
- Yoast SEO — Disable Yoast's sitemap module under SEO → General → Features, or run both and let Google deduplicate.
- Rank Math — Same approach: disable in Rank Math → Sitemap Settings, or coexist.
- All in One SEO — Disable the AIOSEO sitemap module under Sitemap settings.
- WP Rocket / WP Super Cache — No conflicts. Static XML files are served directly by the web server.
- Cloudflare — Make sure
sitemap.xmlis not cached aggressively at the CDN level so search engines see fresh updates.
Headless WordPress and REST API setups
If you run a headless WordPress site (with a frontend like Next.js, Gatsby, or Nuxt), our crawler still works — it crawls whatever your public frontend renders, not the WordPress admin directly. Just point the generator at your public frontend URL (the actual visitor-facing domain) and it will discover all rendered URLs the same way Google would.
Multilingual WordPress (WPML, Polylang)
For multilingual sites, the crawler will follow all internal links it finds — meaning if your language switcher links between language versions of pages, all language variants will be discovered and included. For full hreflang annotation support, you may want to manually edit the resulting sitemap to add hreflang attributes, or use a multilingual SEO plugin alongside.