How to Add a Sitemap to Your WordPress Site

Every website needs a sitemap, but it might not be for the reasons you expect.

Sitemaps do not improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more of your site’s pages get indexed. They also make sure those pages get indexed more quickly. This article presents evidence that the difference is astounding:

• Google with a sitemap: 14 minutes
• Google without a sitemap: 1375 minutes
• Yahoo with a sitemap: 245 minutes
• Yahoo without a sitemap: 1773 minutes

I’m going to show you how to add a dynamic sitemap to your WordPress website.

• In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins > Add New:

1. You will see the “Add Plugin” page.
2. Type “google xml sitemap” into the “Search plugins…” field:

1. You will now see the “Google XML Sitemaps” WordPress plugin listed.
2. Click on the “Install Now” button:

• In a few seconds, you will see the “Activate” button displayed instead of “Install Now”:

1. You will arrive at the “Plugin” page with the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin listed.
2. Click on the “Settings” link:

• You will see the plugin settings:

There you have it. As you can see, your sitemap URL is ready, – no need to create sitemap.xml manually. It will get created on the fly, dynamically. Now everytime your create a post, page, or category, the plugin will notify Google, Bing and other major search engines for you accordingly.

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