Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
-
Hello Everyone!
I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines.
The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process).
Does anyone have a solution?
Thanks,
Aaron
-
In my case, xml-sitempas works extremely good. I fully understand that a DB solution would avoid the crawl need, but the features that I get from xml-sitemaps are worth it.
I am running my website on a powerful dedicated server with SSDs, so perhaps that's why I'm not getting any problems plus I set limitations on the generator memory consumption and activated the feature that saves temp files just in case the generation fails.
-
My concern with recommending xml-sitemaps was that I've always had problems getting good, complete maps of extremely large sites. An internal CMS-based tool is grabbing pages straight from the database instead of having to crawl for them.
You've found that it gets you a pretty complete crawl of your 5K-page site, Federico?
-
I would go with the paid solution of xml-sitemaps.
You can set all the resources that you want it to have available, and it will store in temp files to avoid excessive consumption.
It also offers settings to create large sitemaps using a sitemap_index and you could get plugins that create the news sitemap automatically looking for changes since the last sitemap generation.
I have it running in my site with 5K pages (excluding tag pages) and it takes 10 minutes to crawl.
Then you also have plugins that create the sitemaps dynamically, like SEO by Yoast, Google XML Sitemaps, etc.
-
I think the solution to your server resource issue is to create multiple sitemaps, Aaron. Given that the sitemap protocol only allows 50,000 URLs max. per sitemap and Google News sitemaps can't be over 1000 URLs, this was going to be a necessity anyway, so may as well use these limitations to your advantage.
There's a functionality available for sitemaps called a sitemap index. It basically lists all the sitemap.xmls you've created, so the search engines can find and index them. You put it at the root of the site and then link to it in robots.txt just like a regular sitemap. (Can also submit it in GWT). In fact, Yoast's SEO plugin sitemaps and others use just this functionality already for their News add-on.
In your case, you could build the News sitemap dynamically to meet its special requirements (up to 1000 URLs and will crawl only last 2 days of posts) and to ensure it's up-to-the-minute accurate, as is critical for news sites.
Then separately you would build additional, segmented sitemaps for the existing 200,000 pages. Since these are historical pages, you could easily serve them from static files, since they wouldn't need to update once created. By having them static, there's be no server load to serve them each time - only the load to generate the current news sitemap. (I'd actually recommend you keep each static sitemap to around 25,000 pages each to ensure search engines can crawl them easily)
This approach would involve a bit of fiddling to initially set up, as you'd need to generate the "archive" sitemaps then convert them to static versions, but once set up, the News sitemap would take care of itself and once a month (or whatever you decide) you'd need to add the "expiring" pages from the News sitemap to the most recent "archive" segment. A smart programmer might even be able to automate that process.
Does this approach sound like it might solve your problem?
Paul
P.S. Since you'd already have the sitemap index capability, you could also add video and image sitemaps to your site if appropriate.
-
Have you ever tried using a web-based sitemap generator? Not sure how it would respond to your site but at least it would be running on someone else's server, right?
Not sure what else to say honestly.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Multilingual Sitemaps
Hey there, I have a site with many languages. So here are my questions concerning the sitemaps. The correct way of creating a sitemap for a multilingual site is as followed ( by the official blog of Google ) <urlset xmlns="</span>http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> http://www.example.com/loc> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="</span>http://www.example.com/"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="</span>http://www.example.com/de"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="</span>http://www.example.com/fr"/><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" fr"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" de"="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="" target="_blank"></xhtml:link><a href=" http:="" www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></urlset> **So here is my first question. My site has over 200.000 pages that all of them support around 5-6 languages. Am I suppose to do this example 200.000 times?****My second question is. My root domain is www.example.com but this one redirects with 301 to www.example.com/en should the sitemap be at ****www.example.com/sitemap.xmlorwww.example.com/en/sitemap.xml ???****My third question is as followed. On WMT do I submit my sitemap in all versions of my site? I have all my languages there.**Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond to this thread and by creating it I hope many people will solve their own questions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Tool to check XML sitemap
Hello, Can anyone help me finding a tool to have closer look of the XML sitemap? Tks in advance! PP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0