Sitemap. What is it and how to create it (using WordPress as an example)

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Almost every person who has had to participate in the creation and promotion of Internet resources has heard the term “site map”. It is created for the convenience of users who have visited your project, as well as for better indexing of your site by search engines.

You will learn how to install a sitemap on your blog yourself from this material.

By the way!
The sitemap page does not necessarily have to be called "Contents" or "Sitemap". A phone number library name like "All blog articles" would be quite suitable. Your imagination is not limited here - call it whatever you want!

When a search robot enters your resource, first of all, after the file "robots.txt", it looks for the file "sitemap.xml" (sitemap file for search engines). It does this in order to add to its search base all the articles located on the resource, if it enters for the first time, or only new articles that are not yet in the index, if it has already been there before. The map is also necessary to make it easier and more convenient for the search robot to scan your resource. After going through all the links in the map, it will add new articles to the index.

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Of course, a map is created not only for search robots. On the site itself, in its user part, a site map is also usually made, but for people, conveniently designed. For a quick search of information on your resource - this is a kind of table of contents of the site. Convenient!

By the way!

A sitemap that is made for search engines looks like an unformatted list of pages on a gray background. This type of map is called an XML sitemap.
A sitemap that is created for people - regular visitors to the site - is usually designed in the style of the site and is called an HTML sitemap.
Ideally, you should create both types of sitemaps.

Previously, in the era of static sites, sitemaps were created manually. Now, most often, a sitemap is automatically created by special modules or plugins (they are also called sitemap generators). That is, you just need to add a new article to the site, and a link to it will automatically appear in the sitemap.

Installing an HTML Sitemap (using WordPress as an example)
Find out what management system your site is running on and find a sitemap plugin that suits you. Such plugins have already been developed for all popular CRMs and are often available for free. For example, for CRM WordPress, a sitemap can be generated using the sitemap generator "DD Sitemap Generator".

Download it from the official website "wordpress.org" and install it. If you have another engine, look for a plugin for it. The principle of their work is approximately the same everywhere.

Activate the installed plugin. By the way, the plugin "DDSitemapGenerator" is one of those plugins that do not require configuration after installation.
We are creating a new page on the site. A page, not to be confused with an article!
We give it a name. For example, “All blog articles” or “Table of contents”.
Let's add it to the menu.