New Sitemap Updates!

We’d like to announce our SEO team rolled out the first of several planned improvements to Wix’s default sitemap configuration. These updates create a more scalable sitemap solution that allows a better analysis of your site’s SEO. Changes are automatic, so no action needed - it’s already up and working for your site.

What’s a sitemap?

Basically, Wix creates and maintains a sitemap file for every Wix site. This file can be found by adding /sitemap.xml to your domain name (e.g., mystunningsite.com/sitemap.xml) and is used by search engines to easily discover all site pages. You can learn more about sitemap files here.

What’s new?

In the old sitemap structure, all site pages were hosted under a single sitemap file. In the new structure, the main sitemap file will be used as a “sitemap index” file. This means that instead of listing all pages on the site, the main sitemap will list all other sitemaps related to the site.

Each sitemap listed in the main sitemap file will hold a subset of the sites’ pages. It will be created based on the types of pages that exist on your site. For example, if a site has both Wix Stores and Wix Blog, it will have at least 3 sitemap files listed in the sitemap index file: one for the main site pages, one for blog-related pages and one for store-related pages.

Is there something I need to do?

Since the new sitemap structure will replace the current one in the same location (i.e., /sitemap.xml), any existing service currently reading your sitemap will still be able to find it. There’s no action required from you - you’re all set! The next time Google or any other search engine visits your sitemap, it’ll automatically detect the changes to the structure and crawl your internal sitemaps.

If you want to verify that your new sitemap structure is working properly, submit your sitemap to the Google Search Console “Sitemaps” tool.

Go to Google Search Console > your website > Sitemaps. Once there, you can enter your new sitemap index file and click submit. You’ve basically told Google that these pages have been updated and should be crawled. You can then monitor when Google actually visits these pages by looking at the “Last Crawled” date in Google Search Console.

Have more questions about the sitemap? Catch up on what it’s all about here.