Sitemap XML Generator

Building a sitemap by hand once you have more than a couple dozen pages becomes pointless drudgery, and getting the schema right matters because search engines reject malformed files.

Paste a list of URLs (one per line) and get a valid sitemap.xml with proper schema, optional lastmod dates, change frequency hints, and priority values. The output is sorted by URL and limited to 50,000 entries per file as the spec requires — past that, you need a sitemap index pointing to multiple sitemaps.

Google officially says it ignores priority and changefreq, but Bing and other crawlers still read them, so they're worth setting if you have meaningful differentiation between pages. Lastmod is the field worth being accurate about — Google does use it to decide when to recrawl, and lying about it can cause unnecessary fetches and look spammy.

The sitemap protocol is straightforward: an XML file with a urlset root, individual url entries inside, each containing loc (the URL), optional lastmod (last modified date), changefreq (hint about how often it changes), and priority (relative importance, 0.0 to 1.0). The generator produces this with proper schema declaration and namespace, sorted alphabetically by URL for stable diffs across regenerations. The hard 50,000-URL or 50MB limit per file is enforced; past that, you need a sitemap index pointing to multiple split files.

The pain this addresses: managing a sitemap by hand for a site with hundreds or thousands of pages. Updating it correctly when you add or remove pages, getting the date format right (ISO 8601 in UTC), staying within size limits, validating the XML schema. None of this is hard individually; collectively it's a sustained effort that interferes with actually shipping content. Generating from a URL list short-circuits all of it.

Worked example: paste a list of 250 blog post URLs. Output is a 7KB XML file with each URL, today's date as lastmod, weekly changefreq, and 0.7 priority for blog posts (lower than the homepage's 1.0). Drop it in your site root as sitemap.xml, reference it in robots.txt, submit it via Google Search Console. From submission, indexing usually starts within hours and complete within a week for a small site. For larger sites, expect days to weeks for full crawl.

Where this can go wrong: lying about lastmod. Google explicitly tracks how accurate your sitemap dates are over time. If you update lastmod every day on every URL but the content doesn't actually change, Google deprioritizes the sitemap as a recrawl signal. The right behavior is to set lastmod to the actual date the page content changed, not the date the sitemap was generated. Many CMSes get this wrong, which is why Google trusts sitemap timestamps less than they used to.