Table of Contents
What is sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of webpages that help search engine crawlers for better
understanding to crawl and index your web pages more efficiently and structure the website for indexing.
The XML format includes elements such as last modified dates, change frequencies, and priority levels
that help to provide additional information about each page.
It is also a part of technical seo.
Why do we need to find sitemap?
As you know that sitemap helps you index web pages of your website.
- You need to find sitemap for the following reasons
- Discovering hidden or less accessible content.
- Easy navigation: quickly specific pages or sections on a website.
- Website audit: to identify missing pages, broken links, and orphaned content
First, you need to find the sitemap if you are a website owner to check whether your sitemap has been submitted or not
You can check simply by typing this for example
“digitalmdali.com/sitemap.xml”
as you can see in the below screenshot
If you did not find any sitemap then first submit your sitemap
Submitting your sitemap is not compulsory but it still helps to find pages and get indexed.
But if you have a large website with a lot of content you will need it.
Different ways to find sitemap of a website
Check common locations
This is the most common way to check your website sitemap with different methods by entering the following ur’s
- yourwebsite.com/sitemap
- yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
- yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
Robots.txt
All sites should have robots.txt this file contains instructions for search engine crawlers
and may provide information about the sitemap for quick crawling and indexing.
It includes a link to the sitemap in the robots.txt file
To view the sitemap through the robots.txt file
Simply follow my website URL and replace it with your website URL
For example https://digitalmdali.com/robots.txt
As you can see below screenshot of my sitemap through the robots.txt file
This last line is indicating the location of your sitemap
Using Google Search console
This step only works if you are a website owner or you got access to the search console
First log in to your Google search console (previously also known as the Google Webmaster tool)
And select the website property on which you want to check the sitemap
If you can see the “Sitemap” under the “Index” section
If you already submitted the sitemap you will see the list of submitted sitemaps under the submitted sitemaps section.
As you can see in the below screenshot
Using online tools
You can also check your website sitemap with an online third-party tool called seo site checkup
click on to check your sitemap after clicking on the link you will see “Website URL”
Box put your website URL in that box and click on a checkup and it will show the results
As you can see in the below screenshot it is showing my website result.
Using CMS (WordPress)
Most of the websites have been built on the wordpress platform
so your website also has built on using wordpress CMS
then you can check your sitemap by entering the following URL
yourwebsite.com/wp-sitemap.xml
If you are using any seo plugins then you can check through the above-mentioned URLs
In the “check common locations” step
But if your website has built on the below CMS such as
- Shopify
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Magneto
- Squarespace
- Weebly
- Wix
For all these above-mentioned cms there is only one common way to find sitemap of your website by entering /sitemap.xml next to your website URL for example.
yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
And if you don’t know what your CMS is then you can use this tool called whatcms
simply put your website URL in the box and click on the “detect CMS ” button
it will detect as you can see in the below screenshot.
Using Search Operators
Using search operators, also known as commands, is particularly beneficial for a variety of SEO purposes.
You may also find your website’s XML sitemap by using various commands.
A few commands are mentioned below.
- site:yourwebsite.com filetype:xml
- site:yourwebsite.com filetype:xml inurl:sitemap
- site:yourwebsite.com inurl:sitemap filetype:txt
- site:yourwebsite.com intitle:sitemap
How to download a sitemap of a website
To download your website sitemap go to this tool called XML-sitemaps as you can see in the screenshot how it looks like.
Put your website URL in the box and click on the start button it will start creating your sitemap
after it is completed it will show you “view sitemap details” Simply click on it as you can see on the screenshot below
After clicking on it will show you the “Download Your XML Sitemap File”
Option-click on it and your website sitemap will be downloaded
What Next If I did not find Sitemap?
It’s possible that your site doesn’t have a sitemap.
Then you have to create a sitemap.
You can either directly generate a sitemap in your search console tool or
manually submit your XML sitemap file to your search console,
as described in the section above on how to download the sitemap.
You can also upload it.
So about how to find sitemap of a website.
I hope you found this blog post helpful
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And if you have any queries let me know in the comments.