How to create an XML sitemap

Check these defaults first.

Generators crawl your site from the homepage, follow links, and produce a sitemap file to download and upload to your site root. They work for small static sites without a CMS. Drawbacks: they only find pages linked from others, may include URLs you did not want, and the file goes stale whenever you add pages. Regenerate after every change, or move to an automated method.

For custom sites and apps, generate the sitemap from the same source that defines your pages: the router, a content registry, or the database. Output a urlset with one url element per public page and a lastmod from the page's real modification date. Frameworks often have helpers, such as Next.js's sitemap route. On serionflow.com a build script generates a sitemap index and child sitemaps from the page registry, and pages scheduled for a later release are excluded automatically, so the sitemap always matches what is live.

Include every page you want indexed, using its canonical URL. Exclude redirects, noindex pages, error pages, parameter variants, internal search results, and login or account pages. Keep lastmod accurate; do not set every URL to the build date. For sites over 50,000 URLs or 50 MB per file, use a sitemap index; splitting by page type is useful even below that limit, because Search Console reports indexing per sitemap.

Serve the file at a stable URL with a 200 status and XML content type. Add a Sitemap line to robots.txt. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Check back after a day to confirm it was read without errors. Our free sitemap checker validates the file and flags URLs that redirect, return errors, or carry noindex. SerionFlow is the wrong tool for your site's main sitemap; it maintains a sitemap only for the pages it serves.