A readable sitemap page on a website is one of those helpful, last ditch efforts to help a lost visitor. Today, I’m adding an updated, free plugin from the WordPress Repository to this site. I used a different plugin from the same author. That one has ended and this is the replacement called Page-list it creates sitemaps ONLY for pages. If you need sitemaps for Posts, categories or other post types you might check out. Simple Sitemap.
What is a sitemap page?
It’s a web page on your site designed for actual humans to navigate and find the content they are looking to find.
Why do we need a sitemap page?
If someone can’t find what they are looking for via the menu system on a website or whatever other UI tools are there, blogs, breadcrumbs, buttons and search boxes and more…
Sometimes a sitemap can help. Its something of an outlined index of all the published content on a site. It always includes WordPress page, and it might or might not include the categories or actual posts of Blog articles and other content post types too.
This plugin, can offer multiple display options.
Are there sitemaps that are designed for a different species, non humans?
Sort of. We’re not talking dolphins or space aliens. But there is a different type of ‘sitemap’ file that is designed for web bots, like Googlebot to index, read some code and find similar types of information, plus some code to tell Google how old something is, how often that specific page might change or update and how important that type of content is to us, the site owners.
Generally speaking, the XML sitemap file that is used here will be generated by great plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, Squirrly SEO or many stripped down versions that do not perform all the SEO bells and whistles like these three.
Do I need both types of Sitemap pages and files?
Yes. Ideally, you should have a page for humans and a sitemap.xml file for Google.