Sitemap & Sitemap Index Checker

Check your websites sitemap for broken links or redirects, with this tool.

Just enter your site URL, or your sitemap / sitemap index URLs into the textare below and we will look through all the URLs in your sitemap and identify any that have broken links or redirects which is bad for SEO.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is important for search engines to easily identify all the pages of your site in one list, allowing for much easier crawling and monitoring. It may also be good for pages that are hard to find by bots (for example if you use dynamic / AJAX or user input to determine results).

A sitemap can be as simple as a list of all the http pages on your website, or could include more detailed information such as images on each pages and other metadata.

What is recommended for a sitemap?

Some of the best practices for your sitemap are listed below:

1. It is recommended that your sitemap be placed in the root of your domain, however this is not mandatory and in fact may not be possible depending on your setup.
2. You should list each of your sitemap files in a file called robots.txt in the root of your website.
3. Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB in size (10,485,760 bytes) with a maximum of 50,000 URLs per file. Use a sitemap index file if you have multiple sitemaps.
4. All URLs in the sitemap must point to a working page (200 OK), must not be redirects and must reside on the same domain as the sitemap file.
5. All URLs in your sitemap should be indexable by search engines.
6. If possible your sitemap should list important images (such as product images), and prominent videos for each URL.

Basic sitemap example

Here is an example of a basic sitemap file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com</loc>
 <lastmod>2023-01-01</lastmod>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
 <priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/first-page</loc>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/second-page</loc>
 <lastmod>2023-01-02</lastmod>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>http://www.example.com/third-page</loc>
 <lastmod>2023-01-02T13:00:12+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>