A sitemap generator turns a list of your website's URLs into a file that search engines or site visitors can use to find every page you want discovered. This tool builds that file directly in your browser: paste or upload your own URL list, choose an XML sitemap (standard, image, video, or news) or an HTML sitemap (list, cards, table, or grouped), fill in whatever the format needs, and download a ready-to-use sitemap.xml or sitemap.html. Nothing is crawled, uploaded, or stored - you control exactly which URLs go in.
Who Should Use This Tool
Because it works from a URL list instead of crawling a live site, this generator covers situations a crawler-based tool can't reach:
- Developers and agencies generating a sitemap for a staging site, a password-protected environment, or a site that isn't live yet.
- WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and AEM site owners who don't have (or don't trust) a sitemap plugin - export or copy your URL list from the CMS and generate the file yourself.
- Sites migrating platforms or domains, where you need a sitemap built from a curated list rather than whatever a crawler happens to find.
- Publishers needing an image, video, or news sitemap - formats a basic crawler-based generator often doesn't offer at all.
- Anyone building an HTML sitemap page for visitors and internal linking, independent of whatever XML sitemap already exists.
How to Use the Sitemap Generator
- Choose XML or HTML. XML is for submitting to search engines; HTML is a normal page for human visitors.
- Pick a type or template. XML: standard, image, video, or news. HTML: list, cards, table, or grouped.
- Add your URLs. Paste them (one per line, optionally with a comma-separated title) or upload a .txt/.csv file - up to 5,000 at once.
- Fill in the details. Use the editable table to add titles, dates, priorities, or type-specific fields (image URLs, video metadata, news details), or use the bulk auto-fill buttons to speed this up.
- Generate and download. Review the output (and, for HTML, the live preview), then copy or download the file.
XML Sitemap Types Explained
| Type | What it adds | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | loc, lastmod, changefreq, priority | Default choice for most sites - one URL per entry |
| Image | <image:image> per URL | Image-heavy pages where image search traffic matters |
| Video | <video:video> with thumbnail, title, description, content/player URL | Pages featuring video content you want indexed |
| News | <news:news> with publication name, language, date | Sites approved in Google News, for recently published articles only |
Google's video sitemap format expects a thumbnail URL, a title, a description, and either a content URL or a player URL for each entry - fill these in per URL in the table, since the tool can't infer them from a bare link. News sitemaps work differently from the others: Google's News sitemap protocol is built around content published in roughly the last 2 days, so a news sitemap full of older articles won't do much for you - regenerate it as new articles publish, rather than treating it as a one-time file.
HTML Sitemap Templates Explained
| Template | Layout | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| List | Grouped, nested link lists | Simple sites, fastest to scan |
| Cards | Visual grid of titled cards | Content-heavy or marketing sites |
| Table | Rows of URL / title / category | Large catalogs, documentation, audits |
| Grouped | Collapsible sections by category | Sites with many distinct sections |
Every HTML template downloads as a self-contained page (its own minimal styling included) that you can host anywhere on your site - commonly at /sitemap.html - and link to from your footer or navigation.
How This Tool Works
Parsing, editing, and file generation all happen with JavaScript running in your browser - there's no server call at any point. That's a deliberate trade-off, not just a privacy feature: it means the tool works for URLs it could never otherwise reach (local development, staging, anything behind a login), it has no URL-count limit tied to server capacity, and it costs nothing to run no matter how many people use it at once. The trade-off is that it doesn't verify anything about your URLs - see Limitations below.
What Each Field Means
- Title - display text for HTML sitemaps, and the required title field for video/news entries. Auto-fillable from the URL's last path segment.
- Category - used to group entries in the List/Grouped HTML templates and the Table view. Auto-fillable from the URL's first path segment.
- Lastmod - the date you're telling search engines the page last changed. This tool can't know the real modification date since it doesn't fetch the page, so "set to today" reflects the generation date, not necessarily the content's actual last edit.
- Priority / Changefreq - a 0.1-1.0 relative-importance hint and a crawl-frequency hint. Google has stated it ignores both when crawling; they're included because the sitemap protocol supports them and some other tools and search engines still read them.
- Image / Video / News fields - the extra metadata each extension format requires per Google's sitemap documentation (see the type table above).
Why a Sitemap Matters for SEO
A sitemap isn't a ranking factor - submitting one doesn't directly improve where a page ranks. What it does is help search engines discover and prioritize crawling your URLs, which matters most for large sites, new sites with few external links pointing in, or pages that are hard to reach through normal navigation. Think of it as a diagnostic and discovery aid: it can shorten the time between publishing a page and it getting crawled, but it can't make a low-quality or poorly-optimized page rank better once it's indexed.
An HTML sitemap works differently again - its SEO value is indirect, coming from improved internal linking and making it easier for visitors (and therefore search engines following those same links) to reach pages that might otherwise be buried a few clicks deep.
Practical Example
Scenario: An e-commerce site owner exports 400 product URLs from their CMS as a CSV.
Steps: Paste the list in, choose XML → Standard, click "Auto-fill categories" (splits products by their first path segment, e.g. /shoes/, /bags/), click "Auto priority by depth" (homepage-level pages get higher priority than deeply nested product pages), then generate.
Result: A sitemap.xml with all 400 URLs, sensible priority values by depth, and today's date as lastmod.
Next step: Upload the file to the site's root so it's reachable at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, add a Sitemap: line to robots.txt, and submit the URL in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Real-World Use Cases
- Agencies generating sitemaps for multiple client sites without needing crawl access or hosting credentials for each one.
- CMS users without a sitemap plugin - WordPress, Magento, Shopify, AEM, or a custom-built site.
- Site migrations where the new sitemap should reflect a curated, reviewed URL list rather than whatever a crawl happens to turn up mid-migration.
- News and media publishers needing a fast-turnaround news sitemap for recently published articles.
- Teams building an HTML sitemap page purely for visitor navigation, independent of the XML sitemap submitted to search engines.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Including dead, redirected, or non-canonical URLs. This tool doesn't check your URLs' live status - review your list first, especially if it came from an old export.
- Never adding the sitemap to robots.txt or Search Console. A generated file that isn't referenced anywhere may simply never get found.
- Building a news sitemap once and forgetting it. Google's News sitemap only helps for recently published content - it needs regenerating as you publish, not treating as a static file.
- Leaving required video/news fields blank. A video entry without a thumbnail, title, and content/player URL, or a news entry without a publication name and date, may not be processed correctly by search engines.
- Mixing formats in one submission. Submit a standard sitemap and a dedicated image/video/news sitemap separately rather than expecting one file to cover every use case.
Expert Recommendations
Don't over-invest in priority and changefreq values - Google has publicly said it ignores both, so spend that time instead making sure the URL list itself is accurate and canonical. Keep an eye on the sitemap protocol's own limits: 50,000 URLs and 50MB uncompressed per file; if you're generating a sitemap for a much larger site, split the list into multiple files and reference them from a sitemap index rather than relying on one oversized file. And treat an HTML sitemap as a navigation and internal-linking tool first - its SEO benefit is real but indirect, so don't expect it to substitute for a proper information architecture.
Related SEO Concepts
- Robots.txt - the file where you reference your sitemap's location so crawlers can find it automatically.
- Canonical tags - tell search engines which URL is the "real" one when similar content exists at multiple addresses; a sitemap should only list canonical URLs.
- Crawl budget - the finite attention a search engine gives your site; a clean, accurate sitemap helps it spend that attention efficiently, especially on large sites.
- Sitemap index files - a sitemap that lists other sitemaps, used once a site exceeds the 50,000-URL/file limit.
- Internal linking - what an HTML sitemap page ultimately contributes to, beyond simply listing pages.
Limitations to Keep in Mind
- Nothing is verified live - the tool doesn't check that a URL returns 200, is canonical, or is even reachable. That responsibility stays with you.
- Lastmod dates reflect when you generated the file, not a page's real last-modified date, unless you edit them in manually.
- Video and news sitemaps require you to supply the type-specific metadata yourself; the tool has no way to fetch it from the page.
- The editable table renders the first 500 URLs for performance; bulk actions and the final generated file still cover everything you added, up to 5,000 URLs.
- Your list is not saved anywhere - reloading the page clears it, so download your file before navigating away.
AudEsto builds this generator alongside a handful of other free SEO utilities. Once your sitemap is live, pair it with the tools below to keep your site's structure and crawlability in good shape.