XML Sitemap Generator

XML Sitemap Generator turns a plain list of page URLs into a sitemap.xml file in the format defined by the sitemaps.org protocol, which Google, Bing and other search engines read. It suits small static sites, landing pages and hand-built HTML sites that don't have a CMS generating a sitemap for them.

How the list is converted

Paste one URL per line and press Build sitemap. Blank lines and surrounding spaces are removed, special characters are escaped (an & becomes &, as XML requires), and each URL gets two extra tags:

• <lastmod> set to today's date in YYYY-MM-DD format, the same for every URL;
• <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> for every URL.

There is no <priority> tag. Three URLs, one with a query string, produce:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url><loc>https://example.com/</loc><lastmod>2026-09-25</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
  <url><loc>https://example.com/about</loc><lastmod>2026-09-25</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
  <url><loc>https://example.com/search?q=shoes&amp;size=9</loc><lastmod>2026-09-25</lastmod><changefreq>weekly</changefreq></url>
</urlset>

Fix the lastmod dates

Stamping every page with today's date is convenient, but it isn't accurate for pages that haven't changed. Google says it uses lastmod only when the values are consistently and verifiably accurate, and ignores changefreq and priority entirely. Replace the generated dates with the real last-updated date of each page, or delete the lastmod lines, rather than claiming the whole site changed today. When you regenerate the file later, update only the dates of pages you've actually edited.

Which URLs belong in a sitemap

• Full, absolute URLs starting with https://. The tool doesn't check this, and relative paths such as /about are invalid in a sitemap.
• The canonical version only, meaning the exact address each page settles on, with the same protocol, www choice and trailing-slash style as your canonical tags.
• Pages that return 200 OK, not redirects, 404s or pages marked noindex.
• Unique entries. Duplicate lines are not removed, so clean the list first with the Duplicate Line Remover.
• Encoded characters. URLs containing spaces or non-English characters should be percent-encoded before you paste them.

Leave out search result pages, filtered listings and tracking URLs; the query-string URL in the example above is there to show the escaping, not as a recommendation.

Publishing the sitemap

1. Save the output as sitemap.xml in UTF-8 and upload it to your site's root folder.
2. Submit its address in Google Search Console under Sitemaps, and in Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Add a Sitemap: line to your robots.txt file so every crawler can find it; the Robots.txt Generator includes one.

One sitemap file can hold up to 50,000 URLs and 50 MB uncompressed; larger sites split them across several files listed in a sitemap index. A sitemap helps discovery but doesn't guarantee that every listed page will be indexed.