A sitemap (or site map) is a file that lists every URL on your website that you want to appear in search engines like Google. WordPress.com automatically generates an XML sitemap for you.
A quick way to access your sitemap is to add /sitemap.xml to the end of your website’s address. For example, yourgroovydomain.com/sitemap.xml or yourgroovysite.wordpress.com/sitemap.xml.
You can also follow these steps to locate your sitemap:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Traffic (or Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab, if using WP Admin).
- Scroll down to the Sitemaps section:
The first URL is the standard sitemap most typically used to allow search engines to list your site. We also provide a news sitemap.
When you visit your sitemap, you’ll find a list of links in an XML format—a special format that’s recognizable to search engines. Search engines will “index” these links, which means they save and organize your pages so they can show them to people searching for relevant information. The number of posts in your sitemap is limited to 1,000 recently updated posts.
Sitemaps are activated by default on WordPress.com, but you can take these steps to turn on the sitemaps if they are missing:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Ensure the Jetpack plugin is active.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Traffic (or Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab, if using WP Admin).
- Scroll down to the Sitemaps section.
- Click the toggle switch next to “Generate XML Sitemaps“.
- Access your sitemap at
yourdomain/sitemap.xml.
As long as your site’s privacy settings are set to public and the option to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is not checked, search engines will automatically find your sitemap and use it to index your site. Whenever you update or delete a page or post, WordPress.com automatically sends the update to search engines as well.
Some search engines, including Google, offer the option to submit your sitemap for indexing. While this step is not necessary for your site to be indexed by Google, it can help accelerate the indexing process in some cases. Visit our guide to learn how to verify your site with Google Search Console and submit your sitemap.
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If you’d like to learn more about SEO, visit our free Introduction to SEO course.
News sitemaps are similar to the standard sitemaps for search engines but specific to Google News—a news aggregator service developed by Google. The news sitemap is used by news websites to get their content indexed by Google News. If your website is not focused on news, you can likely ignore the news sitemap.
For a site to be featured on Google News, it must be pre-approved by Google. Once approved, news-based websites can submit the news sitemap to Google News. News sitemaps include posts published in the last 48 hours only.
Image and video sitemaps help search engines index media on your site and display it in search results. By default, these sitemaps are generated automatically and include all images and videos in your Media Library.
Private videos and media on private sites are not indexed. However, visitors cannot see private media unless they are members of your site.
The [sitemap] shortcode will display a list of all your site’s pages in a hierarchical bulleted list, following any parent/child relationships set in Page Attributes. It will look something like this, but with your own pages, and the styling will depend on your theme:
Display this list on any page of your site by inserting a Shortcode block and typing the [sitemap] shortcode.
