What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website, helping search engines discover and index your content more efficiently. It provides metadata about each URL, including when it was last modified, how frequently it changes, and its relative priority.
Sitemaps are especially important for large websites, new sites with few backlinks, sites with dynamic content, and sites with pages not easily discoverable through internal linking.
Sitemap Best Practices
Keep your sitemap under 50,000 URLs and 50MB (uncompressed). Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Update it whenever you add, modify, or remove pages. Use the <lastmod> tag to indicate when content was last changed.