Sitemap Generator
The Sitemap Generator uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once.
If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this plugin, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most WordPress users do), it could be a good idea to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap.
Limitations of the free version
The base version of the Sitemap Generator is free but limited. You can create sitemaps for websites with up to 500 URLs. Advanced features like image or video support aren’t available in the free version.
The service cannot be offered free of charge for larger websites because the crawling is done by servers operated by the plugin developer and renting and maintaining these servers isn’t cheap.
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Features
- Simple setup.
- Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins.
- Low computation costs for your webserver.
Technical Features
- Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
- You could use the user-agent MB-SiteCrawler to control the crawler.
- Support for robots (noindex) meta elements.
- Adds nearly all indexable filetypes (for example .pdf, .xls, .doc) to the sitemap.
- See the document Sitemap Generator Data on my website for more information.
Additional Technical Features of the Pro Version
- Generation of image sitemaps.
- Generation of video sitemaps.
- Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported.
Upcoming Technical Features
- Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps.
- Automatic daily creation of sitemaps.
Technical Requirements
- cURL 7.18.1 or higher.
- Current PHP versions supported by WordPress should provide a compatible cURL version in most hosting environments.
- OpenSSL 0.9.8f or higher.
Data Aggregation and Indexable File Types
I have published a detailed document about how the Sitemap Generator aggregates the data for the generation of sitemaps and which file types are getting indexed on my website.
Avertissements
If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your WordPress root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine.
Pre-Installation Verification Test
If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the plugin, you could use the Online Sitemap Generator on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps.
Use of an External Server
The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.