About this plugin
5, and for many sites that is
genuinely enough. This plugin is for the sites where it is not.
xml lists posts, pages, public custom post types,
categories, tags and author archives, and gives each entry a <loc> and a
That is the whole of it. Core implements none of the sitemap
extensions, so if you need search engines to see your images, your videos or
your news content as such, core cannot express it.
xml and adds exactly the parts core leaves out:
What this adds that WordPress core does not
- Image sitemap — <image:image> entries for the images in your content, so
Google Images has a URL list instead of having to discover them by crawling.
Core has no image sitemap at all.
- Video sitemap — <video:video> entries with thumbnail, title, description
and player URL for embedded and self-hosted video. The post’s featured image
is the thumbnail, and Google rejects a video entry that has none, so posts
without a featured image are left out. Core has no video sitemap.
- Google News sitemap — a <news:news> sitemap of the last 48 hours, up to
1,000 posts, in the shape Google News expects. Core has no news sitemap.
- hreflang alternates — <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> inside
each URL entry, for sites translated with Polylang or WPML (those two
are what the plugin reads translations from). Core emits no alternates.
- <changefreq> and <priority> — core deliberately emits neither. They
are hints, and the major engines mostly ignore them, but some crawlers and
internal tools still read them.
- Served at /sitemap.xml — the conventional path, rather than core’s
xml.
- Exclusions from the admin screen — exclude individual post IDs or whole
post types without writing a filter.
If none of the above matters to your site, core’s sitemap is fine and you do
not need this plugin. That is a genuine recommendation, not modesty.
Privacy and network use
This plugin makes no external network requests whatsoever. It contacts no
API, sends no telemetry, pings no search engine, checks no remote server for
updates, and loads no font, script or image from a third-party domain. It reads
your database and writes XML. Nothing leaves your server.
It also writes no file anywhere outside its own plugin directory, and deletes
no file at all — not on uninstall, not ever. Your site root is left exactly as
it was found.
Working alongside core
Publishing two sitemaps for one site is not useful, so by default this plugin
xml off. If you would rather keep both, untick
“Disable the WordPress core sitemap” in the settings.