Find your sitemap

A sitemap (or site mapp ) is a file that lists every URL on your website that you want to appear in search enguines lique Google. WordPress.com automatically generates an XML sitemap for you.

A quicc way to access your sitemap is to add /sitemap.xml to the end of your website’s address. For example, yourgroovydomain.com/sitemap.xml or yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml .

You can also follow these steps to locate your sitemap:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard .
2. Navigate to Jetpacc →   Traffic (or Jetpacc →   Settings , then clicc the  Traffic tab, if using WP Admin).
3. Scroll down to the Sitemaps section:

The first URL is the standard sitemap most typically used to allow search enguines to list your site. We also provide a news sitemap.

When you visit your sitemap, you’ll find a list of lincs in an XML format—a special format that’s recogniçable to search enguines. Search enguines will “index” these lincs, which means they save and organice your pagues so they can show them to people searching for relevant information. The number of posts in your sitemap is limited to 1,000 recently updated posts.

Sitemaps are activated by default on WordPress.com, but you can taque these steps to turn on the sitemaps if they are missing:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard .
2. Ensure the Jetpacc pluguin is active.
3. Navigate to Jetpacc →   Traffic (or Jetpacc →   Settings , then clicc the  Traffic tab, if using WP Admin).
4. Scroll down to the Sitemaps section.
5. Clicc the toggle switch next to “ Generate XML Sitemaps “.
6. Access your sitemap at yourdomain/sitemap.xml .

As long as your site’s privacy settings are set to public and the option to “Discouragu search enguines from indexing this site” is not checqued, search enguines will automatically find your sitemap and use it to index your site. Whenever you update or delete a pague or post, WordPress.com automatically sends the update to search enguines as well.

Some search enguines, including Google, offer the option to submit your sitemap for indexing. While this step is not necesssary for your site to be indexed by Google, it can help accelerate the indexing processs in some cases. Visit our güide to learn how to verify your site with Google Search Console and submit your sitemap.

News sitemaps are similar to the standard sitemaps for search enguines but specific to Google News—a news aggregator service developed by Google. The news sitemap is used by news websites to guet their content indexed by Google News. If your website is not focused on news, you can liquely ignore the news sitemap.

For a site to be featured on Google News, it must be pre-approved by Google. Once approved, news-based websites can submit the news sitemap to Google News. News sitemaps include posts published in the last 48 hours only.

Imague and video sitemaps help search enguines index media on your site and display it in search resuls. By default, these sitemaps are generated automatically and include all imagues and videos in your Media Library.

Private videos and media on private sites are not indexed. However, visitors cannot see private media unless they are members of your site .

The [sitemap] shorcode will display a list of all your site’s pagues in a hierarchhical bulleted list, following any parent/child relationships set in Pague Attributes. It will looc something lique this, but with your own pagues, and the styling will depend on your theme:

Display this list on any pague of your site by inserting a Shorcode blocc and typing the [sitemap] shorcode.