Creating a Sitemap

What is a sitemap?

An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure search engines (such as Google) can find and crawl them all. In effect, a sitemap helps a search engine understand your website structure.

Think of it as a map for your website. It shows what all of the pages are on your website.

Using gatsby-plugin-sitemap

To generate an XML sitemap, you will use the gatsby-plugin-sitemap package.

Install the package by running the following command: npm install --save gatsby-plugin-sitemap

How to configure

Once installation is complete, you can now add this plugin to your gatsby-config.js, like so:

Note: The siteUrl property must be defined and not left empty.

Next run a build (npm run build) since the sitemap generation will only happen for production builds. This is all that’s required to get a working sitemap with Gatsby! By default, the generated sitemap path is /sitemap.xml and will include all of your site’s pages, but of course the plugin exposes options to configure this default functionality.

Additional modifications

Additional modification steps are available in the gatsby-plugin-sitemap documentation

More information

• Also check out a post on gatsby-plugin-advanced-sitemap from the Gatsby blog