Go Deep About Sitemaps: Essential for WordPress

Welcome to Vipe Studio, the fantastic WordPress agency for development, where know-hows about WordPress are shared and WordPress experts gather to help with any of your WordPress issues.

This time we will talk about something tiny but crucial to WordPress sites and users, and that is called a Sitemap.

A site + a map?

A Sitemap is a file where you list the website content you’d like to be available for the public to access. It will make it much easier for your website visitors when they are trying to navigate your website. Moreover, a Sitemap can be submitted to search engines so that they can index and rank your website.

Now, because the targets for Sitemaps are far different from each other, where one is for humans and the other is for bot or crawler, then there will also be two kinds of Sitemaps needed on your WordPress site.

What are they and how can you use them in your WordPress?

Sitemaps: XML Sitemap and HTML Sitemap

The XML Sitemap is where your page and post URLs are listed for bots and/or crawlers to “index” your website. When someone looks for a certain post related to a certain topic on your site, or in the search engine, bots and crawlers will look for it from Sitemaps that you provided on your WordPress site. So what happens if you don’t prepare a well-organized Sitemap for this use? Well, it is then safe to say that your pages or posts might not be listed on the search engine and it will be more difficult for new web visitors to come to know your amazing website and its content. That would be sad, wouldn’t it?

Further, on XML Sitemap, you can keep the search engine – let’s take Google as the case example – updated with your WordPress changes or modifications by indexing your pages and posts Sitemaps in Google Search Console. This way, Google will know which pages or posts should be crawled first and let them keep track of all of your web updates. This helps when you have hundreds of posts or pages on your website, especially when you need them listed properly in Google Search Results. So make sure you have submitted your Sitemaps to Google and if you need help with it then Vipe Studio will come to the rescue.

As for the HTML Sitemap, it is one that’s provided for your human visitors. All your pages and posts would be listed for them to see and decide which post or page they want to know more about. If your pages and posts are well-listed for visitors to read through then it is very possible to get a traffic increase for your website.

WordPress Sitemaps

Now that you know how important these Sitemaps are for your website, then the next question must be about Sitemaps on your WordPress website. Rest easy, my friends, there are plugins you can add to your WordPress for this, such as the Yoast SEO plugin (for XML Sitemaps) and the Simple Sitemap plugin (for HTML Sitemap). Both are the common choices that most WordPress users choose as their go-to Sitemap plugins.

Sometimes leaving it in only on plugins is not enough. You can also check whether your Sitemap is properly updated and whether the URLs are valid. By going through those Sitemaps, you can delete the old URLs or the incorrect ones. That will further minimize the chance of bots getting confused when checking your Sitemaps.

Having done all of that, you can now wait (while sipping a cup of tea, perhaps) for your traffic to grow. Sitemaps are the parts of SEO bits that can publicize your site even more. Of course, there are other factors lined up after the Sitemap aspect, but at least you have tackled one of them successfully here. And remember, if you ever find issues you can’t solve on your own, the Vipe Studio team is here for you, aiming to be the best WordPress agency for development.

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