How to submit your sitemap to Google
When your crawl finishes, use the download button above to save sitemap.xml to your computer. Then:
- Upload sitemap.xml to your website. Every host has its own way of doing this, but they all amount to the same thing: think of sitemap.xml as just another file on your site, like any page you have ever put up. Your hosting company gives you some way to move files from your computer to your website (a file manager in the control panel, FTP, or a publish button in your site builder). Use it, and put the file in the same folder that holds your home page.
- Check your work in a browser. If your site is example.com, then https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml should show a page full of your links wrapped in XML tags.
- Open Google Search Console (it is free, and if you care about search traffic you want it anyway). Pick your site, find Sitemaps in the menu, type in sitemap.xml, and press Submit.
- Give it time. Google may take hours or days to fetch the file and report on it, so be patient while they work their mojo. A “Success” status means Google can read your sitemap. It does not promise every page gets indexed, and that is normal.
How to submit your sitemap to Bing
Same idea, different desk. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools, pick your site, open Sitemaps, and submit the same address you gave Google. One nice bonus: Yahoo and DuckDuckGo pull much of their results from Bing, so this single submission covers more ground than it looks.
The robots.txt shortcut
Don’t want to open an account with every search engine? Put one line in the robots.txt file at the root of your site:
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Every major crawler reads robots.txt before it crawls your site, and that line tells all of them where the sitemap lives. You can list more than one sitemap this way. This is the lowest-effort option, and it is a fine one.
Questions people ask
Do I need a sitemap at all?
If your site is small and every page is reachable by clicking links, search engines will probably find everything on their own. A sitemap helps most on new sites nobody links to yet, big sites, and pages that are hard to reach by links. It never hurts.
Will a sitemap improve my rankings?
No. A sitemap helps search engines find your pages; it does not move them up the results. Anyone who promises ranking magic from a sitemap is selling something.
Why did the crawl find fewer pages than I have?
The usual suspects: your robots.txt blocks some paths, pages sit deeper than three clicks from the address you entered, links are built with JavaScript the crawler cannot follow, or the pages simply are not linked from anywhere. That last one is worth knowing about. A reader once told us this tool was the only one that caught his linking mistake, paid tools included. For the full symptom-by-symptom rundown (crawl stops at the first page, too many pages, strange characters, Google errors), see sitemap generator troubleshooting.
How big can a sitemap be?
One sitemap file may hold up to 50,000 addresses and weigh up to 50 MB uncompressed. Bigger sites split into several files tied together by a sitemap index file. At that size you are past what this free tool builds, so read the next section.
How often should I rebuild it?
Whenever you add or remove pages. A sitemap is a snapshot, not a subscription. If your site changes daily, you want a tool that keeps the file current for you, like the WordPress plugins mentioned below.
Can strangers use my sitemap against me?
A sitemap only lists addresses; it holds no passwords and unlocks nothing. If a page should be private, protect the page itself. The comment section below has a longer answer from Jim on this one.
More than 600 pages? Run a crawler on your own PC
Fair is fair: our free crawl stops at 600 pages because this server shares its time with everyone. For a bigger site, a good option is SiteOne Crawler, a free open source desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. No page limit, no ads, nothing to pay. Install it, point it at your site, let it run as long as it needs, and upload the sitemap.xml it writes the same way we showed above.
One more honest note: if your site runs on WordPress, you may not need any of this. Yoast, Rank Math, and even plain WordPress generate a sitemap for you automatically and keep it current. Check yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or /wp-sitemap.xml before you do extra work.
Want the nuts and bolts of the file format itself? See our XML Sitemap page.
