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 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 the plugin exposes options to configure this default functionality.

Additional modifications

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

More information