How do I find my website sitemap? For you to have a sitemap for your website, first you need to install a WordPress plugin called Yoast. Yoast will generate a sitemap for you. Yoast will also update the sitemap every time you make any changes or publish new posts. Your sitemap can be found by going into Yoast’s general settings, or by typing ‘/sitemap_index.xml’ at the end of your website address. For example, your website address is ‘mysiteisgreat.com’. To see your sitemap generated by Yoast, you would type ‘mysiteisgreat.com/sitemap_index.xml’.
Let’s find your sitemap step by step
- First, install the Yoast plugin.
- Where to find your website sitemap in Yoast.
- Your sitemap is here.
- How to find your website sitemap in the URL address bar.
- Conclusion.
First, install the Yoast plugin
To install a plugin in WordPress, go to ‘Plugins’ in the menu on the left. Select ‘Add New’ from the popup menu.
Like this.
After clicking ‘Add New’ you come to the WordPress plugin library.
Here, type ‘Yoast’ into the search bar. Then click on ‘Install’.
Like this.
After you click on ‘Install Now’ this link will change to say ‘Activate’. Click on ‘Activate’ and Yoast will start working for you.
Where to find your website sitemap in Yoast
You have Yoast installed and configured. Now you want to find your sitemap.
If you would like a walkthrough on how to install and configure Yoast. Go to my post, ‘how to create a sitemap‘.
First, find ‘SEO’ in the menu on the left. Select ‘General’ from the popup menu.
Like this.
Now you come to your Yoast dashboard.
At the top of this dashboard you have three tabs. They are ‘Dashboard, Features, and Webmaster tools’. Click on ‘Features’.
Your sitemap is here
Once you select ‘Features’, you have a long list. Your sitemap is halfway down on this list.
To see your sitemap, first, you click on the question mark icon.
Like this. Then you get a link to see your website sitemap.
Click on the blue ‘See the XML link’ and you will see your website sitemap.
Your sitemap looks like this.
One link will be a list of your posts and the other link will be a list of your pages. Just click on them to expand them.
For example, if I click on ‘https://thestayguesthouse.com/post-sitemap.xml’. I get this.
I have a list of all posts with an image count and a date when that post was last modified.
How to find your website sitemap in the URL address bar
After you have installed Yoast. You can easily view your sitemap in the address bar.
At the end of your website address you add ‘/sitemap_index.xml’.
For example, to view this websites sitemap. I would type, ‘newblogr.com/sitemap_index.xml’.
If I do that, I get this.
Conclusion
When it comes to sitemaps, I love using Yoast. I install this plugin and immediately it generates a sitemap for me.
I submit that sitemap to Google and Bing once. After that, Yoast will update my sitemap every time I change a post or publish a new one.
Google and Bing will come to my site almost daily to scan my sitemap. Yoast will always the latest sitemap available without me doing anything. It is fully automatic. I am free to concentrate on other tasks.
There are other sitemap generators but I am so pleased with Yoast that I have not tried any others.
If you want to view your websites sitemap. You can go into Yoast’s general dashboard or you can type ‘/sitemap_index.xml ‘ at the end of your website address.
If you would like more in-depth overview of creating a sitemap. Be sure to check out my post about ‘how to create a website sitemap‘.
Comments
Do you have a website sitemap?
How do you generate your website sitemaps?
Do you use Yoast to generate your sitemaps?
I look forward to reading your comments.
