Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps (support Sitemap Index, Multi-site and Google News)

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With BWP GXS you will no longer have to worry about the 50,000 URL limit or the time it takes for a sitemap to be generated. This plugin is fast, consumes much less resource and can be extended via your very own modules (yes, no hooks needed!). Here's a demo of the sitemap index if you are interested.

Google News Sitemap

Add a Google News sitemap to your sitemap index easily. News sitemap can be used to ping search engines individually if you want. And of course, whenever you publish a new post in a news category, all selected search engines will be pinged.

As of 1.4.0, you can use custom post types and custom taxonomies for your news sitemap.

Image Sitemap

If you have any post (of any post type) that supports the Featured image feature, you will be able to add the current featured image to a post-based sitemap with ease.

This feature is available since 1.4.0.

Sitemap Index

A sitemap index, as its name suggests, is a sitemap that allows you to group several sitemaps inside it.

It gives you many benefits such as: possibility to bypass the 50,000 URL limit (for example you can have 10 custom sitemaps, each has 10,000 URLs), or possibility to make the generation time much faster (because each sitemap is requested separately and is built by its own module), etc.

For a search engine to acknowledge your sitemaps, you only have to submit the sitemap index and you're done, no need to submit each sitemap individually.

Splitting post-based sitemaps

As of version 1.1.0, this plugin can automatically split large post sitemaps into smaller ones when limit reached. For example if you have 200K posts and would like to have 10K posts for each sitemap, BWP GXS will then split post.xml into 20 parts (i.e. from post_part1.xml to post_part20.xml).

This not only helps you bypass the 50,000 URLs limit without having to build your custom modules, but also helps make your sitemaps smaller, lighter, and of course faster to generate. This plugin has been tested on sites that have nearly 200K posts and it took less than 1 second to generate the sitemap index.

Furthermore, you can set a separate limit for split sitemaps or simply use the global limit.

Multi-site compatible

Each website within your network will have its own sitemap index and sitemaps.

For sub-domain installation, your sitemap index will appear at http://sub-domain.example.com/sitemapindex.xml. For sub-folder installation, your sitemap index will appear at http://example.com/sub-folder/sitemapindex.xml.

There's always a sitemap index for your main site, available at http://example.com/sitemapindex.xml.

If you choose the sub-domain approach, each sub-domain can also have its own robots.txt.

Custom sitemaps using modules

The unrivaled flexibility this plugin offers is the ability to define your custom sitemaps using modules. Each module is a actually .php file that tell BWP Google XML Sitemap how to build a sitemap file. You can extend default modules or create completely new ones.

This plugin also comes with a convenient base class for developing modules with easy to use and thoroughly documented API. Since modules can be defined by you, there's no limitation what a sitemap can have (for example you can bypass the 50,000 URL limit, as stated above). There's one limitation, though: your imagination ;). Oh, did I mention that you can even use module to create another sitemap index?

For a complete feature list, please visit this plugin's official documentation.

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Get in touch

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Languages

  • English (default)
  • Malaysian (ms_MY) - Thanks to d4rkcry3r!
  • Traditional Chinese (zh_TW) - Thanks to Richer Yang!
  • Romanian (ro_RO) - Thanks to Luke Tyler!
  • Spanish (es_ES) - Thanks to Ruben Hernandez - http://usitility.es

Please help translate this plugin!


Releases (5 )

Version Release Date Change Log
1.4.1 2016-01-15

(2016-01-15) =

  • Bugs fixed
    • Use PHP 5.2 compatible function to get timestamp from a DateTime object. Thanks to K.J Ye for reporting!
    • Fix an issue with upgrade scripts being run too early.
1.4.0 2016-01-14

(2016-01-14) =

For a quick overview of all the changes, take a look at this article instead: http://betterwp.net/bwp-google-xml-sitemaps-1-4-0-released/

  • New Features
    • Add a "News age" setting to allow more control over the Google News sitemap's contents. See http://betterwp.net/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps/faq/#google-news-age for more info.
    • Allow excluding posts by terms. If a post belongs to several terms, it will be excluded if any of those terms is excluded.
    • Add a new filter hook bwp_gxs_external_sitemaps that can be used to add non-BWP sitemaps to the sitemap index. Read here for more info.
    • Add featured image to existing post-based sitemaps.
      • To enable this feature, go to BWP Sitemaps > Extensions and choose to enable the "Google Image Sitemap" extension, and select post type(s) to enable the extension for.
      • This feature is enabled automatically for the Google News sitemap if the news post type has the "Google Image Sitemap" extension enabled for it.
      • As a related change for this new feature, Google News sitemap is now part of BWP Sitemap > Extensions as well.
    • Add ability to use custom post types and taxonomies for the Google News sitemap.
    • Allow regenerating individual sitemap via admin page.
    • Allow adding non-WordPress pages via BWP Sitemaps > XML Sitemaps > External Pages.
    • Allow excluding posts/terms via BWP Sitemaps > XML Sitemaps > Exclude items.
  • Enhancements
    • Disable some inputs when they are overridden via codes and display overridden values instead.
    • Make "Frequency", "Priority" and "Last modified" optional when adding/updating external pages.
    • Handle last modified datetime of non-post items more consistently.
  • Other Changes
    • Update language template file. If you're a translator, please help translating this plugin! For more info, see: http://betterwp.net/wordpress-tips/create-pot-file-using-poedit/
    • Mark as compatible with WordPress 4.4+. Now require at least WordPress 3.6 and PHP 5.2.0.
    • Choosing which post types/taxonomies to generate sitemaps for is now an opt-out setting. Instead of choosing which post types/taxonomies to disable sitemap generation, you would now choose post types/taxonomies whose sitemaps should be generated.
    • Display an error message when enabling the Google News sitemap but it can not be generated.
    • Make it more obvious to check and generate the Sitemap Index when needed.
      • If no sitemap has been generated yet, a button to generate the Sitemap Index will be shown.
      • The "Clear All Logs" button have been moved to the "Sitemap Log" tab, and renamed to "Clear Message Log". Clicking on that button will now clear the message log only, leaving the sitemap log untouched. The sitemap log is expected to be improved in version 2.0.0.
    • Disable indexing of sitemaps using the X-Robots-Tag: noindex header.
    • Add more Google News sitemap languages, allow customizing language list via bwp_gxs_news_languages filter hook.
    • XSLT stylesheet is now disabled by default.
  • Bugs fixed
    • Fix a bug that causes post.xml to be included in sitemap index even when explicitly excluded.
    • Fix a bug that causes the sitemap index to be empty when post-splitting is not enabled.
    • Filter out urls whose protocols do not match the current protocol.
      • When SSL is not used, all HTTPS urls will be filtered out.
      • When SSL is used, all HTTP urls will be filtered out.
    • Fix a bug that makes it not possible to flush the default cache directory. The cause was we cached the cache directory in the BWP_Sitemaps::$cache_directory object, which was not updated correctly when flushing cache.
    • Fix a bug that could lead to custom post types being included in post.xml sitemap.
    • Fix a bug in the Google News sitemap that leads to duplicate posts when posts are assigned to multiple categories.
    • Fix a bug that generate duplicate terms when some terms are excluded.
    • Use UTC timezone when looking for google news posts.
1.3.0 2014-09-03

  • New features

    • Added a new setting to control which post types can be used to ping search engines
    • Added a ping limit setting
    • Added a "Save changes and Flush cache" button

  • Enhancements

    • Plugin's admin areas have been re-organized to be easier to use.
    • Updated all sitemap modules with easier to use APIs.
    • Last modified dates are now more properly handled.
    • Error log has been refined to be more friendly and useful.
    • Post types that do not have any post should not be listed in sitemapindex.xml by default.
    • Posts that are password-protected should not be listed in sitemap files.
    • Be more selective when pinging search engines, this is to avoid double pinging when using plugin like Snitch.
    • Replaced the "Clean PHP errors" function with a "Debug extra" mode that can be used to easily debug "Content Encoding error" and similar errors, more info about "Debug extra" here.
    • When debug or debug extra is on, no-cache headers are sent to ensure a proper debugging environment.
    • Caching is now disabled by default to avoid confusion when setting up the sitemapindex.
    • Cache directory can now be edited via:
      • Plugin's admin area: BWP Sitemaps >> XML Sitemaps >> Caching
      • PHP Constant: e.g. define('BWP_GXS_CACHE_DIR', 'path/to/cache/directory');
      • Filters: use bwp_gxs_cache_dir
    • Added bwp_gxs_excluded_posts filter hook to let users exclude posts using an array of IDs instead of an SQL string. This is meant to replace bwp_gxs_post_where filter hook when using to exclude certain posts. More info here.
    • Added bwp_gxs_excluded_terms filter hook as a taxonomy-equivalent to bwp_gxs_excluded_posts, this works the same as (and deprecates) bwp_gxs_term_exclude.
    • Added bwp_gxs_sitemap_lastmod filter hook to let users modify last modified dates of sitemaps inside a sitemapindex programmatically when needed.
    • Ping settings can now be set per blog instead of site-wise.
    • Added a Spanish translation - Thanks to Ruben!
    • Added more News languages:
      • Hebrew (he)
      • Traditional Chinese (zh-tw)
      • Arabic (ar)
      • Hindi (hi)
      • Japanese (ja)
    • Other enhancements.

  • Bugfixes:

    • Fixed an issue that might cause an extraneous split part to appear.
    • Fixed an issue that might cause "Invalid last modified date" error
    • Fixed an issue that might cause the sitemapindex to use the regular XSLT stylesheet
    • Sitemapindex should now respect excluded posts when splitting post-based sitemaps
    • Other bugfixes.

Important Update Note:

  • if you're using custom modules make sure that you re-read the documentation for updated info about the module API.
  • When the sitemapindex is generated for the first time, you won't see any Last modified date for any child sitemaps because none of them have been generated yet. This is expected and adhered to the official sitemap protocol.

Next major version (1.4.0) will have Image and Video sitemap support, so make sure you stay alerted!
1.1.6 2012-02-19
  • Temporary fix for 1.1.5's broken custom post type URL issue. Expect a 1.1.7 real soon.
1.0.5 2011-06-04
  • Unregistered modules (such as redundant modules from 1.0.3) will now have a 404 HTTP status to prevent search engines from requesting them again.
  • Time for each log entry will now make use of your current timezone setting in Settings -> General.
  • And other minor fixes.

Thanks everyone for using this plugin!