Have you ever wondered how the bugs in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, etc, can read and understand the content on your site? The answer is the Sitemap. If you have ever had this thought, we are sure this article is an invaluable asset to you.
The sitemap is a great utility and is a text file containing all the URLs of a website. Also, it has the functions as a web map and is essential for your site to be able to gain high rankings in the search system, as search engines appreciate websites that have a navigation map when accessing the website. It is beneficial for the bots of the search engines to crawl your site to index (index) as well as to help SEO better.
Moreover, the sitemap is like a traditional geographic map for visitors. Sitemaps will help them access the site quickly without wasting time instead of going around the site and not finding the destination. Because of this, configuring a sitemap on your store is extremely important, especially for the complicated stores.
Before configuring the sitemap, make sure that you have enabled the sitemap feature and don’t forget to follow the attractive topic below.
To configure the Sitemap
- Step 1: Configure Frequency and Priority of Content Updates section
- Step 2: Configure the Generation Settings field
- Step 3: Configure the Sitemap File Limits
- Step 4: Complete the Search Engine Submission Settings section
Step 1: Configure Frequency and Priority of Content Updates section
Go to the Admin panel > click Stores > choose Configuration in the Settings field.
Under Catalog at the left of the panel, choose XML Sitemap.
Open the Categories Options field, and continue with the following:
In the Frequency field, select one of the following options:
- Always
- Hourly
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Yearly
- Never
In the Priority field, type a value between 0.0 and 1.0, then if the priority is the lowest, please set Zero.
Open the Products Options field.
In the two first fields: Fulfill the Frequency and Priority settings as mentioned above.
In the Add images into Sitemap field, choose one of the following options to verify the extent of the images included in the sitemap.
- None
- Base Only
- All
Open the CMS Pages Options field, complete the Frequency and Priority settings as mentioned above.
Choose Save Configure to complete.
Step 2: Configure the Generation Settings
Open the Generation Settings section.
Choose Yes to Enabled and do the following guide:
- Select the hour, minute and second that update the sitemap in the Start field.
- In the Frequency section, select one of the following options:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- In the Error Email Recipient field, type the email address of the person who will be received the notification whenever an error occurs during a sitemap update.
- In the Error Email Sender field, select one of the following:
- General Contact
- Sales representative
- Customer support
- Custom email
- In the Error Email Sender field, choose the used template for the error notification.
Step 3: Configure the Sitemap File Limits
Open the Sitemap File Limits section.
In the Maximum No of URLs Per File field, fulfill the maximum number of URLs per file. The default limit is 50,000.
In the Maximum File Size field, type the maximum file size in bytes. The default size is 10,485,760 bytes.
Step 4: Complete the Search Engine Submission Settings section
Open the Search Engine Submission Settings field.
In the Enable Submission to Robots.txt section, choose Yes to offer the guide to search engines crawling your site by using a robots.txt file.
Click Save Configure to finish.
That is a detailed guide to configuring Sitemap in Magento 2.
Fortunately, this Sitemap function is integrated into Mageplaza SEO extension. It not only helps avoid the duplicate content but also improve the rankings on Google.
Author bio:
Vanessa is a content marketer at Mageplaza.
Skydiver, traveler, record lover, vintage furniture lover and inbound marketing lover.
