A sitemap is the most important element for any WordPress site. As the owner, you must set up a sitemap plugin to generate the links for your posts to submit to search engines for faster indexing of your posts.
Setting up a sitemap is one of the very first things you should do after creating your WordPress site.
Once your sitemap is set, you won’t have to add new pages manually because the sitemap will automatically pick up your new pages and add them to the list. All you need to do is to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster console, Bing webmaster tool, and other search engines.
In addition to your normal posts, you need to generate the sitemap for images as well as videos if you have any on your blog. Images especially can garner a lot of traffic if they are optimized properly.
In this post, you will find some of the best sitemap WordPress plugins that will help to get your posts indexed much faster.
Top Sitemap Plugins for WordPress
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It’s an all-in-one type of plugin for your SEO needs; be it sitewide SEO, on-page SEO, or a sitemap, this plugin will handle everything with ease.
This is one of the must-have plugins for any WordPress site, and if you install this plugin, you will not have to install a separate plugin for the sitemap, so you can save some space there.
Once you activate the plugin, go to SEO > XML Sitemap on your WordPress dashboard to enable the sitemap functionality. Check the enable field and set the sitemap to meet your needs.
When you go to post type, you get three options to create a sitemap for the post, pages, and media. You can decide if you want to exclude any of them from the sitemap here.
This SEO plugin can handle a multisite system as well, so you will not have to install any other plugin for your multisite to setup a sitemap.There is also a premium version of the plugin that will offer you more features and insight about your site.
2. Google XML Sitemaps
With more than one million downloads, this is one of the most popular sitemap plugins for WordPress. This plugin will help your posts get indexed by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com.
This plugin supports all kinds of WordPress posts, be it general posts or any custom post type. Using this plugin means you will not have to install any other plugin for any of your special posts.
It will help the search engine crawlers to find your posts quickly and index them immediately so you can start getting traffic from those search engines.
3. All in One SEO Pack
With over 1 million downloads, the All in One SEO Pack is another widely used SEO plugin for WordPress that offers the XML sitemap option as well. This pluginwas created in 2007, so it is a tried and tested plugin.
The sitemap module in this plugin comes with comprehensive setup options; you have the option to notify Google and Bing about your new posts, to schedule updates, and to include or exclude the post types and taxonomies per your needs.
You also have technical options like compressing the sitemap; you can index the sitemap so that it doesn’t show up in the search results.
4. Premium SEO Pack
This is a comprehensive, premium SEO plugin for WordPress sites that offers you sitemap functionality along with many other useful features. This plugin can be very effective in improving the overall SEO of your site.
It will provide you insight to improve the loading time of your site and make sure that you offer a great experience to your users. You akso get detailed on-page optimization features which is so important.
The internal link building feature will help improve the overall link network on your site. You have an image optimization feature to help you get more traffic through your images as well.
As far as the sitemaps is concerned, they are automatically created; you will never need an additional sitemap plugin because it covers everything from normal posts, to pages, to images, as well as videos on your site.
5. Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps
This is another useful sitemap plugin for WordPress. It’s a very fast and user-friendly plugin. With this, you will never have any limits in terms of number of URLs and it generates links automatically, so you don’t have to do it manually.
6. Youtube Video Sitemap Generator
If you post a lot of YouTube videos in your posts, this plugin will be really useful in helping to drive extra traffic to your site.
This plugin will automatically scan a site’s post content and meta values for YouTube links and automatically generate a video_sitemap.xml.
7. Sitemap Generator
If your site is hosted on a shared server, this sitemap generator plugin can be very handy. Along with normal posts, this plugin supports images and video sitemaps.
The Sitemap Generator plugin allows up to 500 URLs for free, and if you need support for more than that, you can invest in the premium extension.
Final Word
Sitemaps are undoubtedly the most important element of any website because if search engines can’t find your content easily, you will lose a lot of traffic from search engines. That being said, you need to make sure that your site is easy to crawl and index. You should also use the WordPress ping service to let the search engines know about the fresh content on your site.
