About this plugin
Give search engines a clean map of your WordPress site—without installing a heavyweight SEO suite.
Sitemapster creates fast XML sitemaps for your content and images, keeps them current automatically, and gives you control over exactly which sitemap types are published. Install it, choose what you want to expose, and let Sitemapster handle discovery, pagination, and caching in the background.
Everything is generated locally on your site. There are no sitemap files to manage, no external generation service, and no sprawling SEO dashboard competing for your attention.
Why Sitemapster?
🗺️ Help search engines find the right content
Publish a dedicated sitemap index, a content sitemap, and an image sitemap. Sitemapster includes public, indexable content while leaving out password-protected pages and supported noindex content.
⚡ Stay fast as your site grows
Sitemap responses are cached and large sites are split automatically into manageable XML files of up to 1,000 entries. When content changes, Sitemapster invalidates the cache so crawlers can receive fresh URLs without rebuilding every sitemap on every request.
🎛️ Keep control without the clutter
Enable the index, content sitemap, and image sitemap independently. Use only what your site needs—especially useful when another SEO plugin already handles one part of your sitemap setup.
👀 See what search engines see
Open any Sitemapster URL in your browser and review it in a clean, responsive table. You can verify URLs and images without reading a wall of raw XML.
🛡️ Run it on almost any WordPress host
Sitemaps are generated dynamically, with no filesystem writes or permission changes. Sitemapster works with regular hosting, persistent object caches, managed WordPress platforms, and read-only environments such as WordPress VIP.
What you get for free
The free version gives you a complete, dependable sitemap foundation:
- Content discovery: include published posts, pages, and public custom post types.
- Image discovery: include featured images and images attached through the Media Library.
- Independent controls: publish only the sitemap types you need.
- Automatic discovery: advertise the sitemap index in WordPress’s virtual robots.txt.
- Smart exclusions: skip password-protected content and supported noindex, redirect, and canonical settings from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, and The SEO Framework.
- Fresh, cached XML: invalidate generated data when relevant content or settings change.
- Automatic pagination: support growing sites without manual splitting.
- Readable browser view: inspect every generated sitemap at a glance.
- Developer hooks: customize post types, queries, indexability, images, and generator registration.
Default endpoints:
- Sitemap index: /sitemapster_index.xml
- Content sitemap: /sitemap-general.xml
- Image sitemap: /sitemap-images.xml
Go further with Sitemapster Pro
Pro is built for publishers, content teams, agencies, and WooCommerce stores that need more precision and confidence without moving to a full SEO suite.
🎯 Decide exactly what gets discovered
- Choose the public post types included in generated sitemaps.
- Exclude entire taxonomy terms or individual pieces of content.
- Apply inclusion choices to multiple posts with bulk actions.
🎬 Publish specialized sitemaps
- Add important custom URLs that do not exist as WordPress posts, with optional last-modified dates and CSV export.
- Help Google discover local, YouTube, Vimeo, and manually configured videos through a dedicated video sitemap.
- Publish a Google News sitemap for eligible articles from the last 48 hours, with control over publication name, language, and post types.
🛒 Give WooCommerce products their own sitemap
Keep product URLs separate from regular site content with the dedicated WooCommerce sitemap. Include product galleries and variation images in image results, and optionally leave hidden or out-of-stock products out of every generated sitemap.
🩺 Know your sitemaps are healthy
- Validate generated XML from the WordPress dashboard.
- Detect when another plugin or the web server has taken over one of your sitemap URLs.
- Review cache coverage and pre-warm every enabled sitemap manually, daily, or with WP-CLI.
Premium sitemaps are disabled by default and are published only after an administrator enables them.
Requirements
- WordPress 6.4 or newer.
- PHP 8.1 or newer.
- The PHP XMLWriter extension.
Developer filters
- sitemapster_post_types filters the public post types included in sitemap queries.
- sitemapster_query_args filters query arguments for an individual sitemap type.
- sitemapster_is_post_indexable allows individual content entries to be excluded.
- sitemapster_post_images filters the image URLs associated with a content entry.
- sitemapster_url_priority filters the priority value written for each URL.
- sitemapster_generator_classes registers custom sitemap generators.
Privacy
Sitemapster publishes URLs and media URLs belonging to public, indexable WordPress content in XML sitemap responses. Password-protected and supported noindex content is excluded.
The bundled Freemius SDK may send basic profile, website, product, theme, and plugin information after the administrator explicitly opts in. Free users can skip or later revoke this opt-in. License, purchase, update, and account operations for Sitemapster Pro communicate with Freemius.
The plugin stores settings, a cache-version value, short-lived generation locks, and generated XML transients in the WordPress database or configured object cache. Primary plugin settings and version options are removed when Sitemapster is uninstalled. Cached values expire according to the configured cache lifecycle.