Detailed Guide to Ecommerce XML Sitemap
Table of Contents
A sitemap is a file that comprehensively lists all available content – pages, videos and images, on any given website. Google’s guidelines allow for XML, txt and HTML sitemaps, though XML sitemaps are the most commonly referenced format.
An XML sitemap file typically includes page URLs, the number of images per page, and the page’s last modified date. Depending on a website’s size and complexity, there can be multiple XML sitemaps within the parent file.
The usual URL path for an XML sitemap is: https://examplecompany.com/sitemap.xml
Why Are XML Sitemaps Important For eCommerce Websites?
Mid to large ecommerce websites vary in their overall size and complexity. Such websites can have an extensive selection of product categories, sub-categories and informational pages.
Having one detailed XML sitemap or multiple smaller XML sitemaps helps eCommerce sites in the following ways:
1. Improved Crawling and Indexing
A comprehensive XML sitemap on an e-commerce website gives search engines direct insight into its structure. This includes key transactional pages like product, category, and promotional listings, and non-transactional pages like blog articles and informational content.
This improved structural access allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently, ensuring faster indexing of all relevant pages.
In today’s competitive online marketplace, enhanced indexing boosts search result visibility, driving more organic traffic clicks and ultimately increasing site revenue.
2. Content Discoverability
XML sitemaps improve search engine discovery of new and updated content. This is due to the inclusion of ‘last modified’ date meta-data in XML sitemaps.
For instance, when product pages are added or updated on your e-commerce site, search engine bots detect the changed ‘last modified’ date and prioritise re-crawling those pages.
This re-crawl ensures that the indexed content is promptly updated in search results.
What Are The Different Types of XML Sitemaps For eCommerce?
Within XML sitemaps, there can be a few sub-categories such as webpages, images and videos.
Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is a specifically designed XML sitemap that supports search engines in indexing website images.
For large e-commerce sites heavily reliant on visuals, particularly product imagery, these sitemaps help search engines understand image content better.
Video Sitemap
Similar to image sitemaps, a video sitemap is an XML file providing details of video content on your site.
You should create a video sitemap if your online store employs video marketing, product demos, or how-to tutorials. This sitemap allows you to inform search engine bots about video location, title, description, and duration.
News Sitemap
A news sitemap is mainly useful for websites publishing news content, and informs search engines of recent articles or posts.
This sitemap type is irrelevant for e-commerce sites, being solely beneficial to news publishers.
How to Create an XML Sitemap for Your Online eCommerce Store?
Step 1: Streamline and Organise Site Content
Begin by outlining your website’s main product categories. For example, a clothing shop’s primary categories could be: Men, Women, Kids, and Accessories.
Within each main category, subdivide into subcategories. For instance, under “Women”, these could include Tops, Bottoms, Dresses, and Shoes.
Once categories and subcategories are defined, ensure each product page URL is listed under its relevant subcategory.
Step 2: Gather Additional Pages
Beyond product pages, your sitemap should also include other key pages.
Include links to essential informational pages such as About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service. For websites with a blog, add blog category pages, buying guides or how-to posts.
Step 3: Use Sitemap Tools
To generate a sitemap efficiently, you can use an online tool such as XML-Sitemaps.com or an SEO Audit Tool like Screaming Frog (covers 500 URLs in the Free version).
For managed CMS platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix and others, a sitemap will be autogenerated for your site. In case that’s not the case, you can use SEO plugins such as RankMath and Yoast to generate an XML sitemap.
Step 4: Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines
Once your sitemap is ready, submit it to the search engines like Google or Bing.
For Google, you can create an account or log in to Google Search Console. Navigate to the “Sitemaps” section and submit your sitemap URL (e.g., www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml).
Similarly, for Bing, create an account and submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.
How to Submit XML Sitemaps to Google Search Console?
Submitting your XML sitemap to Google Search Console (GSC) ensures that Google can efficiently crawl and index your website.
Step 1: Access Google Search Console
Login to your Search Console account and choose the preferred website/property which you want to add a sitemap.
If you don’t have an account yet, you can create a free account on Google Search Console by using your Google account ID.
Once your account is created, you can add a website/property and verify ownership.
Step 2: Navigate to the Sitemaps Report
In the left-hand navigation menu, click on “Sitemaps” under the “Indexing” section. This will take you to the Sitemaps report, where you can manage your sitemaps.
Step 3: Submit Your Sitemap
In the “Add a new sitemap” field, enter the full URL of your XML sitemap. This typically looks like https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.
If you have a sitemap index file (for larger websites), submit that URL instead.
After entering the sitemap URL, click the “Submit” button. Google will now crawl your sitemap and begin to process the URLs contained within.
Step 4: Monitor Submission Status
After submitting your sitemap, monitor the Sitemaps report.
Google will email Search console account admins about any processing issues or errors, helping you identify and resolve technical problems. After error resolution, you can resubmit the sitemap, following the same format as outlined in Step 3.
Large e-commerce websites with multiple sitemaps should either submit each XML sitemap individually or through a sitemap index file.
Ecommerce Sitemap Best Practices
A comprehensive XML sitemap is crucial for improved site visibility and search engine optimisation.
Here are some best practices and actionable tips to enhance your ecommerce sitemap strategy:
1. Include Key URLs
For an ecommerce site, include important commercial intent pages including category, sub-category, product and brand pages.
Only add URLs with 200 (Relevant URLs) OK response code.
If you have URLs with 301 ( URL redirections) or 404 response codes (URL no longer exists), remove them from your XML sitemap. Also, remove pages with noindex directive.
2. Include Only Canonical URLs
Include only canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content from being crawled and indexed.
Additionally, use clean, simple, structured, and descriptive URLs. (See our guide on Optimising SEO Friendly URLs for eCommerce websites.)
3. Add Metadata to Your Sitemap
Include metadata like priority, last modified date, and change frequency to provide search engines with additional information about your URLs.
What each of the metadata elements means:
a. Priority
This element tells search engines how important a page is relative to other pages on your site, using values from 0.0 to 1.0. While it doesn’t directly affect rankings, it helps search engines with crawl prioritisation.
Please note that any priority value you assign to a URL( 0.0 – 1.0 ) only signals the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site. It doesn’t help the higher priority URLs rank better than other URLs.
b. Last Modified
This element indicates the last time a page was significantly updated, signalling to search engine bots when it should be re-crawled.
Use it for significant content changes (not minor tweaks). It may be particularly useful for dynamic pages (with a greater change frequency) such as category pages, product pages, and sales pages.
c. Change Frequency
This element signals how often a page’s content changes and how frequently search engine bots should recrawl it.
Here are some examples of the values that can be used for the <changefreq> tag:
always– Changes constantly (e.g., real-time feeds).hourly– Frequent updates (e.g., news sites, stock prices).daily– Regular updates (e.g., blogs, product pages with price changes).weekly– Moderate updates (e.g., category pages).monthly– Infrequent updates (e.g., about pages, policies).yearly– Rare updates (e.g., terms & conditions).never– Static pages that never change (e.g., archived content).
4. Split Large Sitemaps into Smaller Ones for Better Manageability
If your ecommerce site has a significant number of pages (e.g. hundreds of thousands or more ), consider splitting your sitemap into smaller, topical sitemaps (e.g., one for categories, one for products, one for images, article guides and so on).
Below is a screenshot from the John Lewis Sitemap Index:
Smaller sitemaps are easier for search engines to crawl and for you to manage.
They can also reduce the risk of errors, as it’s easier to identify issues within smaller, organised sections of your site.
Google recommends limiting any sitemap to 50,000 URLs or 50MB (uncompressed).
Common Mistakes to Avoid with Ecommerce XML Sitemaps
When working with XML sitemaps, my recommendation is to avoid these five common mistakes:
1. Empty Sitemap
A significant error is having no XML sitemap or an empty one.
An empty XML sitemap offers no value to search engines and does not present your site’s content effectively. Ensure your sitemap includes relevant pages for indexing.
If you’re a small website with less than say 100 pages, you don’t really need an XML sitemap but it’s still a good practice to have one.
2. Outdated Sitemap
An outdated sitemap can include links to expired/unavailable products or removed pages. This is bad because search engine bots may crawl these inactive pages, assuming they are live.
I’d recommend regular sitemap checks and updates to reflect your website’s current state and to avoid any crawling inefficiencies.
3. Duplicate URLs
Having duplicate URLs within a sitemap negatively impacts SEO. That’s because Search engines may struggle to determine which page version to crawl and index.
Regularly check your XML sitemap for duplicates, ensuring each URL is unique and valid.
Utilise canonical URLs to further prevent duplicate content problems. Finally, monitor your Pages in Google Search Console to spot errors early on.
4. Including Broken Links
Another common error is having broken links in the XML sitemap. If search engines attempt to navigate to a page that no longer exists, it hurts your site’s credibility with search engines.
Regularly audit and remove/redirect broken links on your site and update your XML sitemap accordingly.
5. Including Non-Indexable Pages
Your sitemap should only include pages that are meant for search engines to index.
Including pages that are blocked by robots.txt or those marked with “noindex” tags, can confuse search engines. Please focus on including pages that you want Google & other search engines to discover.
How Many XML Sitemaps Should an Ecommerce Website Have?
The size of an online eCommerce store can range from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands to a million+ pages.
It’s best to strategically manage your XML sitemaps to optimise for performance, and catch errors early on.
Sitemap Limits To Be Aware Of:
The sitemaps protocol imposes certain limits:
- Maximum Sitemap Size: Each individual sitemap file can hold a maximum of 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs. If your website exceeds these limits, you’ll need to organise your XML sitemap into multiple files.
- Sitemap Index Files: If your website exceeds the maximum URL limit allowed for a sitemap, you will need to split your sitemap into multiple files. Consider a sitemap index file to do that. A Sitemap index acts as a container that links to multiple individual sitemaps.
Also, the sitemap index file makes it convenient to submit multiple sitemaps to Google, all at once.
How Should You Split Your XML Sitemaps?
Given size limits for an XML sitemap, here are some recommended approaches for large websites to split their sitemaps:
- Categories: An effective way to split XML sitemaps is by product categories. Example – If you sell clothing, you can create separate sitemaps for men, women, and children’s apparel.
- Geographical Locations: If you sell products internationally, consider creating sitemaps based on regions or countries. This is particularly important for D2C retail websites with presence in multiple countries.
- Digital Assets: If your site invests heavily in different forms of media assets, its worth segmenting and creating separate XML sitemaps for each media type. Example – Im
Dynamic XML Sitemaps for Ecommerce Websites
For mid to large e-commerce websites with frequent product updates, manually managing XML sitemaps becomes cumbersome.
Dynamic sitemaps allow web developers and site owners to auto-update sitemaps based on any changes to the site structure and content changes.
Key Benefits of Dynamic XML Sitemaps:
- Real-Time Updates: This is particularly beneficial for online stores with a large inventory. This ensures that all updates are quickly reflected in the sitemap, and in turn, communicated to search engines.
- Enhanced Crawling and Indexing: Dynamic sitemaps improve crawling and indexation by providing search engines with an accurate and up-to-date list of URLs.
- Error Reduction: Automatic updates significantly reduce the risk of including outdated or incorrect URLs in the sitemap. This means fewer errors for search engines to handle.
FAQs About Ecommerce XML Sitemaps
Can ecommerce sites rank without a sitemap?
Yes, small ecommerce sites can rank without a sitemap. For mid to large ecommerce websites, having an XML sitemap significantly improves crawling and indexation.
An XML sitemap clearly guides search engines through your website’s structure, highlighting important pages.
Without one, search engines may struggle to find and index all product pages and other key content, potentially reducing your site’s visibility and SEO performance.
Does every ecommerce site need a sitemap?
While it’s technically possible to operate an ecommerce site without an XML sitemap, I still recommend having one as part of your SEO foundations.
Having an XML sitemap allows for better crawling and indexation. That, in turn, helps improve your search visibility and organic traffic.
How do I find my sitemap URL?
Finding your sitemap URL is fairly straightforward. For popular managed Content management platforms (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify), the sitemap is automatically generated and can be accessed by adding /sitemap.xml at the end of your website’s root domain.
For example, if your online store is www.example.com, your sitemap URL would be www.example.com/sitemap.xml. If you’re using a platform like WordPress with a plugin, the sitemap URL may vary, but it often follows the same pattern or is indicated in the plugin’s settings.
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