Choosing What Goes in Your Sitemaps
A sitemap is a list of pages you want search engines to index. Every URL in it should be a page you would be happy to see in search results. This article walks through each control on the XML Sitemaps tab at Super Speedy > Sitemaps.
Sitemaps to generate
Enable following sitemaps switches whole sitemap types on and off:
| Sitemap | Default | What it lists |
|---|---|---|
| Site Address | On | Your home page. On multisite, every site address in the network |
| Taxonomy (including custom taxonomies) | On | One sitemap per enabled taxonomy, listing its term archive pages |
| Date archives | Off | Monthly and yearly archive pages |
| Author archives | Off | One page per author |
| External (non-WordPress) pages | Off | URLs you add by hand. See External Pages |
Date and author archives are off because on most sites they repeat content that already has its own URL, and Google treats them as thin pages.
Post types
Enable following post types lists every public post type on the site, all ticked. Posts appear in post.xml, pages in page.xml, and each custom post type in post_<type>.xml. WooCommerce products, for example, are post_product.xml.
Only published, non-password-protected content is listed. Attachment pages are never included.
Taxonomies
Enable following taxonomies lists every public taxonomy. All are ticked except Tags, which are usually thin pages. Categories appear in taxonomy_category.xml, WooCommerce product categories in taxonomy_product_cat.xml, and product attributes such as pa_colour in their own files.
When The SEO Framework or Super Speedy Filters controls whether a taxonomy is indexable, its checkbox is greyed out with a help icon naming the plugin in charge and linking to the setting that decides it. See SEO Plugin Integrations.
Exclude items
Exclude items removes individual URLs without switching off the whole sitemap.
- Exclude posts – choose a post type from the drop-down, then search for and select the posts to leave out.
- Exclude terms – choose a taxonomy, then select the terms to leave out of its sitemap.
- Exclude posts by terms – tick Also exclude posts that belong to excluded terms to drop every post in an excluded term as well. A post in several terms is excluded if any of them is excluded.
Use exclusions for pages that exist but should not be indexed: thank-you pages, account pages, landing pages for paid campaigns, discontinued products you keep online.
A URL you mark noindex in Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress or All in One SEO stays in this plugin’s sitemap unless you also exclude it here. Search Console reports that as “Submitted URL marked noindex”. The SEO Framework and Super Speedy Filters are the exceptions: their indexing decisions are read automatically.
Developers can exclude items in code instead. See Developer Reference.
Default values
Default change frequency, Default priority and Minimum priority fill in <changefreq> and <priority> only when the plugin cannot calculate them. For posts, change frequency is worked out from how recently the post was modified, so a post edited an hour ago shows hourly and an old one shows a slower frequency.
Google ignores <changefreq> and <priority>. It does use <lastmod>, which this plugin always fills from each post’s last-modified date. Leave the defaults alone unless another search engine you care about reads them.
Look and feel
- Make sitemaps look pretty – adds an XSLT stylesheet so a person opening a sitemap in a browser sees a readable table instead of raw XML. Search engines ignore it. Off by default.
- Custom XSLT stylesheet URL – your own stylesheet. You need a matching index stylesheet beside it:
my-stylesheet.xslandmy-stylesheetindex.xsl. - Enable credit – adds a short comment naming the plugin to each sitemap. It has no effect on search engines.
After changing anything
If caching is on (Advanced Options > Sitemap Cache), click Save Changes and Flush Cache so the next request rebuilds every sitemap with the new settings.
Further reading
Written for Super Speedy Sitemaps 1.11.17.
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