Creating and sharing an XML sitemap

An important tool to help search robots such as Google understand the structure of your site is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, ensuring that Google and other search engines can locate and index them, thereby enhancing their comprehension of your website’s structure

Here are the first few listings on the sitemap I use on my site:

Figure 4.5 – The XML sitemap for my site

As you can see, I have 322 URLs on my site. The sitemaps list them all and make it easy for search engines to understand when they were last updated, which category they’re in, and where they’re located.

XML sitemaps are now in WordPress core

One of the incredible things about WordPress is that it’s always evolving. In the first iteration of this book, you had to install an SEO plugin to configure your XML sitemaps.

As of WordPress 5.5 XML, sitemaps are included in...