WordPress SEO: 5 Fantastic Plugins to Add Sitemaps to your Website

Site ‘map’. The name itself is pretty telling.

These little markup/XML maps give your human and search bot visitors a comprehensive look at the way the content is laid out on your website. As such, these are very, very good for your User Experience and SEO metrics. In fact, here is Google telling you exactly how great sitemaps are.

Now, for existing WordPress websites, adding these beauties is simple. Like with most anything else, you do it with a plugin.

This is a list of those plugins. Let’s begin with the ones that are fully-fledged SEO suites with sitemap feature as icing on the cake:

1.    Yoast SEO

Price: Free-mium (Premium version starting at $69/year for single site)

Stats: Over 1 million active installs

This is one of the first WordPress SEO plugins that, quite frankly, caused a sensation. Its popularity is the entire base of Yoast’s sterling success.

The plugin is feature-packed for all levels of Search Engine Optimizers. It prompts creation of more SEO-friendly content, and the XML sitemap feature coupled with access to .htaccess and robots.txt files make this tool necessary for generation and optimization of the sitemaps themselves. The coup de grace comes from its multisite capability, and the sitemaps do work just as flawlessly with a multisite network as they do on individual websites.

Premium extensions are available at various prices: News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO, etc.

2.    All in One SEO Pack

Price: Free-mium (Pro version without support available for sale at $79 OTP, Support – $10/month)

Stats: Over 1 million active installs

Even the free version of this plugin is nothing to be trifled with.

The All in One SEO pack is the perfect tool for those SEO-junkies who know their way around technical optimization. It has some powerful features for creating XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, navigational links, eCommerce support, and more.

What’s truly remarkable about the premium version is the advanced SEO for custom post types, and video XML sitemaps for those websites that are rich in audio-visual content.

All in One SEO pack is a powerhouse, and it is meant (quite rightly) for professionals. It also gets bonus points for loading fast and easy compatibility with almost anything.

3.    Premium SEO Pack

Price: $40

Available at: Themeforest.net

Stats: Over 5,000 sales

Also: rated 4.2/5 by hundreds of happy customers.

Brought to you by the same team of developers who created some hot-selling moneymaking plugins for becoming an affiliate website, Premium SEO Pack is capable of handling most anything your SEO team can throw at it.

The plugin has everything you would need for SEO, plus added caching features (JS and CSS minification) because loading speed does matter. There is a 404 error page monitor, link builder (for those chumps who haven’t upgraded to WP 4.5 yet), a built in W3C validator, directory submission, social stats, etc… and of course, the sitemaps.

The sitemap feature will give you the squeaks: multiple sitemaps, video /images sitemaps, location based, and the ability to edit them every which way with robots.txt and .htaccess.

4.    Google Sitemap by BestWebSoft

Price: Free (Premium version available)

Stats: Over 100,000 active installs

The Google Sitemap plugin is almost a classic. The plugin is a no-nonsense tool that lets you create and add an XML sitemap to your Google Webmaster tools/ Google Search Console.

It’s fairly simple and has no frills or bows in form of extended features. That’s more up the Pro version’s ally, which lets you set sitemap update frequency and include/exclude pages and posts from the map as needed.

5.    XML Sitemaps

Price: Free

Stats: Over 10,000 active installs

XML Sitemaps is a free, lightweight, simple plugin that generates XML sitemaps and notifies search engines as they’re updated.

There are basic options for including/excluding posts based on publish date, authors, categories, tags, along with specific pages as directed. It also has the cached sitemap functionality.

While the plugin hasn’t been updated in over 12 months, it still remains largely functional and as effective as ever at what it does best.

Endnote

XML sitemaps are one of the few fair ways of search engine optimization. And despite the notoriously vague ranking factors handed out by search engines, everyone (including the big wig search engines) agrees that the sitemaps play a vital role, simply by the virtue of making your content easier to crawl.

There’s no downside to adding them to your WordPress website.