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Plugin Description
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 would be wise 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.
Out of service
It’s no longer possible to purchase tokens for the Sitemap Generator as of mid-January 2023.
The service is still available for all users that have already purchased a token and will be shutdown when the last issued token expires mid-January 2024.
Paid plugin
Please note that the Sitemap Generator plugin requires a paid token to operate. The free version is no longer offered.
Video
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.
Additional Technical Features of the Professional Version
- Generation of image sitemaps.
- Generation of video sitemaps.
- Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported.
Upcoming Technical Features
- Support for Vimeo videos in video sitemaps.
- Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps.
- Automatic daily creation of sitemaps.
Technical Requirements
- cURL 7.18.1 or higher.
- PHP 5.3 should be compiled against a compatible cURL version in the most cases. PHP 5.4 or higher should by default provide a compatible cURL version.
- 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.
Sitemap Generator Data
Is the service free of charge?
The Sitemap Generator Professional is a paid plugin. A free version was offered for many years, but since August 2022 only a paid version is available.
Sitemap Generator Professional
Warnings
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.
Screenshots
The user interface of the Sitemap Generator.
