Sitemaps

Generated pages are added to the sitemap your site already uses. You do not create or maintain a separate file.

In a test on a site without an SEO plugin /wp-sitemap.xml listed wp-sitemap-pseo-1.xml, which contained entries like:

<url><loc>https://example.com/wpmcf-doc-a10/zurich/</loc><lastmod>2026-10-03T13:30:36+00:00</lastmod></url>

The core sitemap works only while WordPress's sitemaps are on (they are by default; some SEO plugins turn them off and provide their own, which is why Yoast and Rank Math have their own integration).

Which pages are listed

A page is listed when all of these are true:

• the page is live (not hidden, removed, moved or converted),
• it is indexable: not kept out of search results by the task, a quality rule or a hand edit (Show in search results / noindex),
• its task has List pages in the sitemap switched on (default),
• no real WordPress content has taken over its URL since the last run (a shadowed page is left out),
• the license currently allows generating pages (the sitemap provider is only registered then).

So noindex pages never appear: in the test, switching the task to Show pages in search results off removed every page of the task from the sitemap. The template page is never listed (core, Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO). Converted pages are real posts and appear in the normal post sitemap.

Pages of languages other than the default list their language URL (see Multilingual pages).

lastmod

Each entry carries lastmod in ISO 8601. It is the date of the page's last real change: a new title, URL, new data in the row, a template field or AI content change. A run that finds nothing new does not move it, which is what search engines want. Editing the template does not change lastmod (the plugin cannot know what changed on which page).

The same date is sent as the HTTP header Last-Modified on the page and as article:modified_time.

Images

Add each page’s share image to the sitemap (step Search engines › Sitemap; "Helps the images appear in image search (Yoast SEO and Rank Math sitemaps).") adds the page's share image to its entry. The WordPress core sitemap format has no image field, so this switch does nothing there.

Page counts and size

Each sitemap file holds the number of URLs your sitemap setting allows (WordPress: 2,000 by default via the wp_sitemaps_max_urls filter; Yoast: 1,000 via wpseo_sitemap_entries_per_page). 50,000 pages are split into many files; the index updates itself. Lists are read with indexed queries in order of page ID.

Submit it

Submit the sitemap index once in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (/wp-sitemap.xml, or /sitemap_index.xml for Yoast SEO and Rank Math). Generated pages are picked up through it. Crawlers also find the index from robots.txt, which WordPress and the SEO plugins fill.

New pages that you want to roll out gradually can use New pages per day (Running and scheduling): pages that do not exist yet are not in the sitemap either.

Turning pages out of the sitemap