Product Sitemaps

A sitemap is a list of your pages that you give to search engines so they find everything. This plugin makes a sitemap of your products and product categories.

The sitemap addresses

Replace yourstore.com with your own domain.

Address	What it lists
yourstore.com/wog-sitemap.xml	The main index. Submit this one. It points to the others.
yourstore.com/product-sitemap-1.xml	The first batch of products. More batches (-2, -3 and so on) appear as your catalog grows.
yourstore.com/product-category-sitemap.xml	Product categories that contain products
yourstore.com/product-brand-sitemap.xml	Brands, only when your store uses a brand taxonomy that has products. It is listed in the index automatically.

What is included

• Published products that are visible in your catalog. Hidden products and products hidden from search are left out.
• The product’s last-changed date and the product’s main image.
• Products per file: set in Sitemaps > Products Per Sitemap (100 to 1000, default 500).

Per-product social output being off does not remove a product from the sitemap.

How it stays up to date

• The sitemap is built when a search engine (or you) requests it, and kept for one hour.
• A daily background job rebuilds it.
• Saving a product or category schedules a rebuild about ten minutes later.
• Generate Now on the Sitemaps tab clears the saved copies and rebuilds them in the background. It reports “Sitemap generation queued. Files are rebuilt in the background over the next few minutes.” The Last Generated time updates when the files are actually written.

Background jobs run on WordPress’s scheduled task system, which needs some visits to your site to trigger. A very quiet site may take longer to finish.

robots.txt

When the sitemap is on and your site is visible to search engines, the plugin adds a Sitemap: line pointing to the main index to the virtual robots.txt that WordPress produces. If your site has a real robots.txt file on disk, WordPress does not use it, so add the line yourself.

Test it

On the Sitemaps tab, click Test Sitemaps. The plugin fetches the main index and reports “Sitemaps are working correctly!” or what went wrong. See Submit the Product Sitemap to Google Search Console.

The sitemap files tell search engines not to list them

The sitemap pages send a “noindex, follow” signal. This is normal for sitemap files: it keeps the XML file out of search results while search engines still follow the links inside.