Andre Moura

<p>Easy XML Sitemap is a lightweight and extensible XML sitemap plugin for WordPress.</p>
<p>It generates a sitemap index and multiple sitemap endpoints, supports all public custom post types, and can include images and videos inside each URL entry (Google extensions). It also provides a Status page with technical statistics (generation time, URL counts, hits, and ping results) so you can quickly confirm that everything is working.</p>
<p>The plugin is designed to be safe in real-world WordPress setups:<br />
– It uses caching for performance<br />
– It supports large sites via sitemap index and posts organization options<br />
– It includes WP-CLI commands for maintenance<br />
– It pings search engines on updates with debounce to avoid excessive requests<br />
– It detects when Yoast SEO or Rank Math are active and warns you clearly, without automatically overriding other plugins</p>
<p>Main sitemap index URL:<br />
– /easy-sitemap/sitemap.xml</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>Sitemap Index at <code>/easy-sitemap/sitemap.xml</code></li>
<li>Supports all public Custom Post Types (CPTs) with UI controls</li>
<li>Posts can be organized as:
<ul>
<li>Single sitemap (all posts in one file)</li>
<li>By date (one sitemap per month/year)</li>
<li>By category (one sitemap per category)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Image sitemap extension:
<ul>
<li>Featured images</li>
<li>Images found in post content</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Video sitemap extension (conservative and safe):
<ul>
<li>YouTube embeds supported with reliable thumbnails</li>
<li>Self-hosted video supported when thumbnail is available</li>
<li>Vimeo supported only when a reliable thumbnail is available (fallback strategy)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Automatic ping to search engines on content update (debounced)</li>
<li>Status page with technical sitemap statistics and ping results</li>
<li>WP-CLI commands: status, regenerate, clear-cache</li>
<li>robots.txt integration (adds sitemap URL to the virtual robots.txt)</li>
<li>Per-post exclusion controls (existing feature preserved)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Sitemap Endpoints</h3>
<p>Sitemap index:<br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/sitemap.xml</code></p>
<p>Legacy endpoints (still supported):<br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/posts-index.xml</code><br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/posts-YYYY-MM.xml</code> (when organizing posts by date)<br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/posts-{category-slug}.xml</code> (when organizing posts by category)<br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/pages.xml</code><br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/tags.xml</code><br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/categories.xml</code><br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/general.xml</code><br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/news.xml</code></p>
<p>Custom post type sitemaps (v2.0.0):<br />
– <code>/easy-sitemap/{posttype}.xml</code> (example: <code>/easy-sitemap/product.xml</code>)</p>


Easy XML Sitemap

Easy XML Sitemap is a lightweight XML sitemap generator with custom post type support, image and video extensions, WP-CLI, and automatic ping.

Marco Beierer

<p>The <a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/wordpress-plugins/sitemap-generator" rel="nofollow ugc">Sitemap Generator</a> uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once.</p>
<p>If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this plugin, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most WordPress users do), it could be a good idea to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap.</p>
<h4>Limitations of the free version</h4>
<p>The base version of the Sitemap Generator is free but limited. You can create sitemaps for websites with up to 500 URLs. Advanced features like image or video support aren’t available in the free version.</p>
<p>The service cannot be offered free of charge for larger websites because the crawling is done by servers operated by the plugin developer and renting and maintaining these servers isn’t cheap.</p>
<h4>Video</h4>
<span class="embed-youtube" style="text-align:center; display: block;"><iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/odTnCazabSE?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></span>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Simple setup.</li>
<li>Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins.</li>
<li>Low computation costs for your webserver.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Technical Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
<ul>
<li>You could use the user-agent MB-SiteCrawler to control the crawler.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Support for robots (noindex) meta elements.</li>
<li>Adds nearly all indexable filetypes (for example .pdf, .xls, .doc) to the sitemap.
<ul>
<li>See the document <a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/tools/sitemap-generator/data" rel="nofollow ugc">Sitemap Generator Data</a> on my website for more information.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Additional Technical Features of the Pro Version</h4>
<ul>
<li>Generation of image sitemaps.</li>
<li>Generation of video sitemaps.
<ul>
<li>Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h4>Upcoming Technical Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps.</li>
<li>Automatic daily creation of sitemaps.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Technical Requirements</h4>
<ul>
<li>cURL 7.18.1 or higher.
<ul>
<li>Current PHP versions supported by WordPress should provide a compatible cURL version in most hosting environments.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>OpenSSL 0.9.8f or higher.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Data Aggregation and Indexable File Types</h4>
<p>I have published a detailed document about how the Sitemap Generator aggregates the data for the generation of sitemaps and which file types are getting indexed on my website.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/tools/sitemap-generator/data" rel="nofollow ugc">Sitemap Generator Data</a></p>
<h4>Warnings</h4>
<p>If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your WordPress root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine.</p>
<h4>Pre-Installation Verification Test</h4>
<p>If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the plugin, you could use the <a href="https://www.marcobeierer.com/tools/sitemap-generator#generator" rel="nofollow ugc">Online Sitemap Generator</a> on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps.</p>
<h4>Use of an External Server</h4>
<p>The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.</p>


Sitemap Generator

An easy to use XML sitemap generator with support for image and video sitemaps for WordPress.

Easy XML Sitemap vs Sitemap Generator