XML Sitemap Generator

Have a list of URLs and need a valid sitemap.xml fast?

Small sites, static builds and one-off landing page sets often have no plugin to produce a sitemap. If you already know which pages you want search engines to find, this generator wraps them in correct sitemap XML: the right namespace, one entry per address, and special characters escaped. Paste, click, download. It never visits any of the pages, so what comes out is only as good as the list you put in.

Step by step

1. Export or type the final, canonical addresses of the pages you want indexed and paste them into the large box, one per line.
2. Choose values in the three dropdowns. They are defaults in the literal sense: one frequency, one last-modified setting and one priority for the whole file.
3. Press "Generate Sitemap" and scan the XML that appears.
4. Press Download for a file called sitemap.xml, or Copy to paste the code into your own file.
5. Upload it to your web root, reference it in robots.txt, and submit it under Sitemaps in Search Console.

What to watch for

The lastmod setting deserves the most thought. It starts on Leave it out, which is the safe choice for most lists. Today (your device clock, read as a UTC date) and a picked date both apply one value to every single entry. Google has said it trusts lastmod only when the dates prove accurate over time, so a file claiming every page changed on the same day teaches it to disregard the field. If your pages changed on different days, add true dates per URL by hand after downloading. Google ignores the changefreq and priority values, so their settings here are cosmetic as far as Google is concerned.

Quality control is also manual. Repeated lines stay repeated, relative paths are not rejected, and nothing flags an address that redirects, returns an error or carries noindex.

Questions people ask

How many URLs can one sitemap hold?

The protocol caps a single file at 50,000 URLs and 50MB before compression. Larger sites split their URLs across several files and list those files in a sitemap index.

Does submitting a sitemap get pages indexed?

It helps discovery, not selection. Google still decides whether each page is worth indexing, and a sitemap cannot override thin content, canonical tags pointing elsewhere or blocked crawling.

Why is there no hourly option?

The frequency menu offers weekly, daily, monthly, yearly, always and never. Hourly is valid in the protocol but is not listed. Since Google does not use changefreq, the missing option makes no practical difference there.

Further reading: XML Sitemap Strategy Beyond One Big File: Index Sitemaps, Segmentation, and Using lastmod to Steer Crawling and How to Submit a Sitemap to Google.

The same tool is also published on the static mirror at seoprocheck.github.io, and the rest of the set is on the free tools page.