How to Create an XML Sitemap for a Small Website

By Small SEO Tools · Updated October 11, 2026 · SEO Guides

An XML sitemap gives search engines a list of the public page URLs you want them to discover. For a small website maintained by hand, the useful part is having a checked list that stays in step with your published pages. The XML Sitemap Generator can turn that list into a downloadable file, but you still need to decide which URLs belong in it.

First check whether your site already has a sitemap

WordPress and other content management systems often provide a sitemap automatically. Inspect the sitemap your site software already maintains and use its settings to correct the page list when necessary. An automatic sitemap is usually easier to keep current than a second file maintained by hand. This guide is for static pages, brochure websites and other sites where you control a short URL list yourself.

A small site with good internal links may already be easy for Google to discover. A sitemap can help discovery, especially on a new site, but it does not guarantee crawling or indexing. Keep important pages reachable through your navigation as well. See Google’s sitemap overview for when a sitemap is useful.

Build a list of final, published URLs

Open each page you plan to list and copy its complete address. Use the version your site actually serves as the preferred page: the correct HTTPS address, hostname and path. Google recommends absolute URLs and including your preferred canonical versions in its guide to building and submitting sitemaps.

The generator takes one URL per line. It does not visit your site to find pages, test whether they load or inspect their canonical tags. A line accepted by the tool still needs your review.

Example: a three-page brochure website

The following addresses are illustrative. Suppose a business has a home page, a services page and a contact page. Its old services address redirects to the new one, and its form confirmation page is intentionally excluded from search.

Candidate address	Decision for this example
`https://example.com/`	Include the published home page.
`https://example.com/services/`	Include the current services page.
`https://example.com/contact/`	Include the public contact page.
`https://example.com/old-services/`	Leave out the redirecting address; the destination is already listed.
`https://example.com/thank-you/`	Leave out the page that the site owner has chosen to exclude from search.

The input is therefore:

https://example.com/
https://example.com/services/
https://example.com/contact/

Use the same public hostname throughout this ordinary, single-site sitemap. The tool accepts URLs from different hosts, so it will not catch an accidentally pasted address from another website. If you need to review an intentional search exclusion, the related guide on robots.txt and noindex explains the separate controls.

Choose dates and optional settings deliberately

The current tool starts with weekly change frequency, 0.8 priority and Today’s date for last modified. These are starting values, not information the generator has discovered about your pages. Each selected value is applied to every URL in the output.

For a straightforward file, select Omit changefreq and Omit priority. Google’s sitemap guidance above explains that Google ignores both tags. For last modified, use a truthful date for the page’s last significant update; generating a file today does not mean every listed page changed today.

Choose No lastmod if you cannot supply accurate dates. A single Custom date is suitable only when it is correct for all the listed pages. If each page changed on a different date, omit the field here or maintain each entry’s accurate date after downloading. Leaving Custom date blank falls back to today’s date in this tool, so it is not a way to omit the tag.

Generate the file and review the result

Paste the three complete example URLs into the input, one per line.
Select Omit changefreq, Omit priority and No lastmod.
Click Generate Sitemap.
Check that the report shows three URLs, zero invalid lines skipped and zero duplicates removed.
Review the output, then click Download sitemap.xml.

With these settings, the example produces:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/services/</loc>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/contact/</loc>
  </url>
</urlset>

The generator trims spaces at the ends of lines, skips empty lines and removes exact duplicate addresses. A relative path such as /contact/ is rejected. It also rejects a URL containing an unencoded space. However, different spellings, slash variations and query strings are not merged into one preferred URL. Resolve those choices before generating the file.

If a deliberately chosen URL contains an ampersand between query parameters, the output writes it as & inside <loc>. That is XML escaping; it does not change which page the URL identifies. The generator handles XML entity escaping, but does not repair malformed addresses or percent-encode their contents.

The sitemaps.org protocol specifies UTF-8, the XML structure and escaping rules. It also limits one sitemap to 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed. This tool leaves out entries beyond the first 50,000 and reports the omission; it does not create additional files. Check the downloaded file’s actual size if your list grows large, since the displayed size is approximate.

Check the uploaded sitemap and keep it current

For this static-site example, upload the downloaded file to your public site root so it is available at https://example.com/sitemap.xml. Open that address and confirm that the server returns the XML file successfully, rather than a login screen, an HTML error page or a redirect to the home page.

Submit its location through the Sitemaps report for your site in Google Search Console. You can also add a line to the site’s robots.txt file:

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Google’s sitemap guidance linked above covers both submission methods. Review reported processing errors after Google reads the file. Successful processing means the sitemap could be read; it does not promise that every listed page will appear in search.

Keep the original URL list alongside your site files. When you publish a new page, add its final URL; when a page is removed or redirected, update the list before replacing the sitemap. For a hand-maintained site, making that review part of each publishing change is more useful than repeatedly generating an unchanged list with a new date.