WordPress to include XML sitemaps in 5.5

An update is coming to WordPress, and it’s great news for site operators who aren’t thinking about one of the technical SEO requirements they should be.

One of the things site operators don’t always think about is a website’s sitemap, or worse, they misinterpret what it means.

Throughout the past five years I’ve been doing SEO pretty aggressively, that misinterpretation has been pretty consistent. Ask a client what their sitemap situation is and they’ll often direct you to an HTML listing of how you get around their webpage. You know, the old idea that a sitemap is a listing of pages for users.

But that’s not the type of sitemap I’m interested in, and it’s certainly not the type of sitemap Google is interested in.

Google and other search engines are looking for an XML sitemap that tells it what your webpages are, when they were updated and last changes, and if they have images on them. They might even look for change regularity, but for the most part, search engines look for a sitemap made for a search engine.

A search engine sitemap tells search engines what pages you have, when those pages were changed, and give it a reason to come back and index. There are several types of sitemaps, and if you publish news, you’ll want a different kind of sitemap running alongside your regular sitemap, but these search engine-focused sitemaps are the sitemaps I’m looking for when I ask about them, and they’re exactly what Google is looking for, as well.

Depending on the platform your website runs on, search engine sitemaps can be generated on the fly or even from software, but if you use WordPress, you’re probably relying on something like Yoast to do it for you, or another plugin. It’s so normal to rely on a plugin in WordPress that it’s just more or less par for the course, and when WordPress sites don’t have a sitemap, I always wonder why when it’s so easy.

Turns out it’s about to get even easier.

As part of the WordPress 5.5 update, sitemaps will be built into the core, providing an automatic generation of sitemaps at /wp-sitemap.xml. Depending on what you need, WordPress has suggested this will be based on standard post and page types, and won’t support the extra news functionality, so if you need that, you may still need that other plugin, likewise with image and video sitemaps.

However it’s a great step, and means that moving forward, websites using WordPress will have one less reason to struggle with search. There will still be plenty to do to make websites connect better with search, but this is an inclusion that should help plenty of site operators, particularly those who still think a sitemap is for users.