Sitemaps

Sitemaps are files that list each post and page that should be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. Jetpack allows you to generate such files thanks to the Sitemaps feature.

To enable Sitemaps, open your WordPress.com dashboard, click Tools → Marketing → Traffic and click the toggle switch next to Generate XML Sitemaps. Once activated, Jetpack will generate four different sitemaps for you:

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

Sitemap for Search Engines

Jetpack’s sitemap can be accessed at yourdomain/sitemap.xml.

No need to do anything extra on your end, just make sure that the Sitemaps feature is enabled!

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, visit sitemaps.org.

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 — again, you don’t need to do anything extra. 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 site so that it can be displayed in searches for that specific type of media, e.g. images or video files.

Sitemap Update Frequency

• The News sitemap is generated on the fly when requested. That is, 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.

How to add more Post Types to the sitemap

The default sitemap only includes Posts, Pages, and the Custom Post Types included in Jetpack. If you’d like to add a new Custom Post Type to the default sitemap, you can use the jetpack_sitemap_post_types filter to specify your own array of post types to include.

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

How to disable the Image sitemap

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' );

Note: The above code snippet is provided as-is for you to use as a starting point for making your own customizations. We do not provide additional support for customizing or changing how Jetpack functions on your site.

Use Jetpack’s Sitemap feature alongside other Sitemap plugins

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.

My Sitemaps are enabled. What’s next?

While search engines can find your sitemap by visiting your site’s robots.txt, for a new site, it can be quite a while before search engines discover and start crawling your site. To help jump start this process, it’s a good idea to submit 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.

Troubleshooting

My sitemap does not update

The News sitemap is generated on the fly when requested. That is, 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.

I want to update the Jetpack sitemap, specifically the URLs submitted to Google.

This is an automated process Jetpack takes care of: Jetpack 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, you need to make sure that the sitemap(s) XML file gets updated first on the server. 

“Sitemap cannot be read” error in Google Search Console

Crawl errors using Jetpack generated sitemap 

This appears in the Google Search Console or any other search engine console management (most likely it’s Google).

Depending on the error detected, the solution might change – we don’t have a complete list of errors at the moment, we’re working on it. If you are using a different plugin for SEO related stuff, stick with that. Alternatively, if you still want to use the Jetpack sitemap, then you need to deactivate any other SEO or Sitemap plugins. 

404 error when trying to load the sitemap

The first thing to try is to head to Settings > Permalink and click saving.

If that doesn’t help, there may be an issue with rewrite rules on your server, or in your .htaccess file. Check if you have any security or redirection plugins enabled. If you can’t find anything, ask your host to check for any rewrite rules that might be interfering.

The sitemap doesn’t list the image URL served by Jetpack CDN (Site Accelerator)

This is expected as the sitemap lists the original URLs even though the images are served by the Site Accelerator feature.

The sitemaps are constantly being purged and moved to trash

If Jetpack has been recently updated to a new version, it might have run into a version mismatch in the plugin_upgrade function. Try deactivating and deleting Jetpack entirely, and then reinstalling it.

If you can’t remove the Jetpack plugin via the WP Admin dashboard, FTP into your site and delete the wp-content/plugins/jetpack folder. If you’re not sure how to do this, ask your hosting company for help.

After that’s done, you can reinstall Jetpack by following these instructions.

Despite Jetpack being connected, I can’t activate the Jetpack Sitemap

Jetpack won’t activate the Sitemap feature if it detects that you’re already using another popular sitemap plugin. Deactivate any other SEO or Sitemap plugins and try again. 

The sitemap is blank, displays a white page, or shows a header with no URLs

There are several reasons why the Jetpack sitemap displays a blank page. Try the following:

• Check for conflicts: deactivate and reactivate your plugins one by one.
• Check for any security features you may have enabled, and try temporarily disabling them.
• Search for any firewall on your server-side that might be conflicting – your host should be able to help you with that.
• Update Jetpack to its latest version.
• Toggle off/on the Sitemap feature.
• Check if your caching plugin is synced, or try disabling it completely.

Empty News sitemap

If you have a blank News Sitemap, first follow the same troubleshooting steps outlined above for the main sitemap. Also, make sure that you have published something recently, and that you have submitted the site to Google News.   

There are no XML-Tags or there are Missing XML-Tag errors

Try temporarily deactivating all your plugins and check if that solves the problem. If it works, then reactivate each plugin one by one to find out which one is causing problems.

If the error still persists, then reach out to us directly via our dedicated forum or via this contact form. 

My Sitemap(s) are not showing all of my site’s URLs

The general sitemap and news sitemap have limits of 2000 and 1000 URLs respectively, to keep sitemaps within the 50MB size limit. If you need to increase that limit, you can add the following constants to your site’s wp-config.php file and edit the values as required:

define( 'JP_SITEMAP_MAX_ITEMS', 2000 );

define( 'JP_NEWS_SITEMAP_MAX_ITEMS', 1000 );

You will then need to deactivate and reactivate the Sitemaps module in Jetpack to trigger a new index. Keep in mind that generating sitemaps with thousands of URLs can take some time.

Privacy Information

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

Data Used
Site Owners / Users   The URL of the page/post, the title of the page/post, and the publication date of the page/post.Additionally, for activity tracking (detailed below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.	Site Visitors   None.
Activity Tracked
Site Owners / Users   We track when, and by which user, the feature is activated and deactivated.	Site Visitors   None.
Data Synced (Read More)
Site Owners / Users   We sync options that identify whether or not the feature is activated and some additional information around sitemaps, including the state of the sitemap, the location of the sitemap, and which post types are included in the site map.	Site Visitors   None.