Sitemaps

Generate sitemaps so that your posts and pages can be found by search engines like Google or Bing.

Turn Sitemaps on

To enable Sitemaps, follow these steps:

1. Visit your WordPress.com dashboard.
2. Click Tools → Marketing → Traffic
3. Click the toggle switch next to Generate XML Sitemaps.
4. Access your Jetpack Sitemap at yourdomain/sitemap.xml.

To help search engines find your website faster, we recommend submitting your sitemap (along with other information about your site) to the various webmaster tools programs that search engines offer, like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You’ll need to add and verify your site on both services before you’re able to submit the sitemap.

Types of sitemaps

Jetpack will generate four different sitemaps for you:

• A general sitemap for search engines, with your public posts and pages
• A news sitemap built specifically for Google News
• An image sitemap
• A video sitemap

Sitemap for search engines

The sitemap file generated by Jetpack is available to every search engine that supports the protocol, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com, and others. If you would like to learn more about the protocol, please visit sitemaps.org.

You can customize this filter to remove specific posts, pages, or URLs from your sitemap.

Jetpack automatically updates the sitemap file every 12 hours (or every time the content changes in the case of the News Sitemap). This happens on the server-side, not on Google. If you want to update the sitemap(s) directly in Google Search Console, please make sure that the sitemaps’ XML files gets updated first on the server. 

News sitemap

News sitemaps are very similar to standard XML sitemaps for search engines, but they are specific to Google News. Publishers must be pre-approved for Google News before Google will index a news sitemap. News sitemaps include only posts published in the last 48 hours.

Once you activate the Sitemaps feature, you’ll be able to access your news sitemap at yourdomain/news-sitemap.xml Approved publishers must log in to Google Search Console and add their news sitemap location as another sitemap.

Don’t forget to apply to get your posts listed in Google News.

Image and video sitemaps

The image and video sitemaps help search engines index media on your website so that it can be displayed in searches for that specific type of media, e.g. images or video files.

The Image sitemap is enabled by default. You can disable it by adding the following code to your site:

add_filter( 'jetpack_sitemap_image_skip_post', '__return_true' );

Keep in mind that the sitemaps are automatically updated around every 12 hours by using WP-Cron. The effect of the filter will not take place until the next update.

If you are using Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (our CDN), the sitemap will list the original URLs even though the photos are served by the CDN.

Sitemap update frequency

• The News sitemap is generated when it’s requested. New posts are added to this sitemap right away.
• Other sitemaps including post, image, and video sitemaps are automatically updated around every 12 hours by using WP-Cron.

If you have noticed that your sitemaps are not updated after 12 hours, please contact us via our dedicated forum or via this contact form.

Add more post types to the sitemap

The default sitemap includes:

• Posts
• Pages
• Custom Post Types included in Jetpack: Portfolios, Testimonials, Simple Food Menus, and Comics

To add a new Custom Post Type to the default sitemap, use the jetpack_sitemap_post_types filter to specify your own set of post types to include.

The News sitemap only lists posts by default. To add another post type to the News sitemap, use the jetpack_sitemap_news_sitemap_post_types filter.

Choose which sitemap plugin to use

There are a number of plugins in the plugin repository that allow you to create sitemaps for your WordPress site. If you already use such a plugin, you can either remove that plugin and use Jetpack’s Sitemap feature instead, or leave Jetpack’s Sitemap disabled. We won’t activate our Sitemap feature if we detect you’re already using one of the more popular sitemap plugins on your site.

If you are using a different plugin for SEO-related stuff, stick with that. Alternatively, if you still want to use the Jetpack sitemap, please deactivate any other SEO or Sitemap plugins. Using multiple sitemap plugins can result in a “Sitemap cannot be read” error in Google Search Console, or other errors.

define( 'JP_SITEMAP_MAX_ITEMS', 2000 );

define( 'JP_NEWS_SITEMAP_MAX_ITEMS', 1000 );

Troubleshooting

Typical issues with sitemaps include:

• 404 error when loading the sitemap
• Sitemaps constantly being purged and moved to trash
• Sitemap is blank, displays a white page, or shows a header with no URLs
• Empty News sitemap
• No XML-Tags or there are “Missing XML-Tag” errors

The following troubleshooting steps should resolve these types of errors:

1. Make sure you are using the most updated version of Jetpack
2. Go to Settings > Permalink and click Save.
3. Check for conflicts: deactivate and reactivate your plugins one by one.
4. Check for any security features you may have enabled, and try temporarily disabling them.
5. Search for any firewall on your server-side that might be conflicting – your host should be able to help you with that.
6. Toggle off/on the Sitemap feature.
7. Check if your caching plugin is synced, or try disabling it completely.
8. Check if you have any redirection plugins enabled. If you can’t find anything, ask your host to check for any rewrite rules that might be interfering.

Privacy Information

Sitemaps are deactivated by default. They can be activated any time by toggling the Generate XML sitemaps setting in the Sitemaps section from Jetpack → Settings → Traffic in your dashboard.