Sitemaps are an essential component of any WordPress site, enabling search engines to find, categorize, and understand your site’s content. Here are some tips for resolving issues related to generating valid sitemaps.
Quick Tips
- We recommend using Yoast SEO or Google XML Sitemaps.
- To avoid conflicts, use only one sitemap plugin. Customizing your
- Customizing robots.txt may affect how sitemaps are generated.
Sitemap best practices
We recommend Yoast SEO
The plugin we use most often to add sitemaps to WordPress sites on Shifter is Yoast SEO. It’s one of the most popular plugins available for WordPress SEO, and we’ve added special features to the Shifter platform specifically to support this plugin.
We also support the Google XML Sitemaps plugin
Shifter also supports Google XML Sitemap, a free plugin available in the WordPress plugin directory, making it easy to add a sitemap. If you don’t need many of Yoast’s features, this is our second recommendation.
Troubleshooting Missing Sitemaps
If you’ve generated a static version of your site and can’t find the sitemap even though it was visible in WordPress, there are a few things you can check.
Using Multiple Sitemap Plugins
If you’re managing sitemaps using multiple plugins, features, or functions, this can cause plugin conflicts and lead to sitemap failures. If the generator cannot detect the sitemap due to this conflict, the sitemap will not be generated. To resolve this issue, check for any other sitemap plugins that are installed and active, and either deactivate or remove them.
Conflict with Virtual Robots.txt
Shifter supports customizing the robots.txt file using the Virtual Robots.txt plugin. However, if you’re using a dedicated SEO plugin such as Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps, we do not recommend enabling this plugin to customize your SEO settings.
Why does this cause a conflict?
Yoast’s sitemap mechanism works by adding the URL of the generated sitemap to the robots.txt file. The lines that Yoast adds to the robots.txt file may be overwritten if you use the Virtual Robots.txt plugin. The most common solution to this issue is to disable the Virtual Robots.txt plugin and run a test. View the robots.txt file and search for the XML sitemap entry added by Yoast. If you find such an entry there, you can confirm that the conflict is caused by the plugins. If your project requires you to manually add entries to the robots.txt file, make a note of the entry added by Yoast and manually add it back to robots.txt using the Virtual Robots.txt plugin to
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