PRO Sitemaps review 2024: App features, pricing, pros & cons

Navigating the world of SEO can be complex, in this review we’ll break down how PRO Sitemaps can simplify the sitemapping part. Ideal for webmasters and SEO professionals, this tool is designed to create, maintain and host sitemaps for your website to improve search engine discovery.

Let’s get started.

Key Takeaways

• PRO Sitemaps is a multipurpose tool that aids in link management, sitemap generation and SEO optimization, facilitating better website discoverability and indexing by search engines.
• PRO Sitemaps caters to non-technical users, supports multiple formats, is compatible with WordPress and offers a range of subscription plans.
• Integrating PRO Sitemaps with other SEO tools and analytics can further improve website navigation, efficient crawling and indexing by search engines.

What is PRO Sitemaps?

Owned by XML-Sitemaps.com, PRO Sitemaps is an easy-to-use tool for sitemap generation as well as a solution for link management, site maintenance and optimizing website structure.

If your goal is to enhance your search engine optimization, sitemaps are a must, particularly an XML sitemap which they host on their server.

PRO-Sitemaps also automatically submits your XML sitemap to Google Search Console (you’ll need to submit to other search engines manually) for indexing and greater discoverability which can result in better search rankings by providing critical information about your website’s:

• Pages
• Links
• Videos
• Images
• URL structure

In addition to text, HTML and XML sitemaps, you can generate specialized sitemaps for:

• Images, including details like captions and geolocation to enhance visibility in search results
• Videos, providing search engines with detailed information about video content to improve discoverability in search results
• News content, ensuring that news articles are included in search results
• RSS feeds, allowing search engines to easily crawl and index the latest content from your website

Related: What is a sitemap?

Features

While on the no-frills side, PRO Sitemaps still manages to pack in some nice features in the paid version.

Link analysis

Links, both internal and external, are hugely important for search engine optimization. Knowing where your link game stands allows you to resolve issues and your site’s performance.

Internal links report

A list of links presented in a tree or table view that shows the connections between your pages. Useful in assessing site navigation and structure. You’ll also see the status of the page in terms of indexation.

External links report

This is a list of links you’re linking out to from your website as well as the page status, in this case, if the link is correct or broken.

Detect broken links

There’s nothing more frustrating for a user than clicking a page and hitting a 404 error. Broken links can torpedo search engine optimization, PRO-Sitemaps can detect them for you so you can fix them asap.

URL structure report

Another helpful tool in site management and maintaining healthy structure, keeping tabs on URL structure ensures your links are clean and nothing is too many clicks away.

Crawl configuration

On top of choosing which type of sitemap you need, you can also configure the attributes that search engine crawlers see, including:

• Change frequency to alert search engines when you update certain pages
• Last modification to make search engines aware of recently changed pages
• Priority to denote the importance of a page relative to other pages on your site
• Multi-language compatible if your site caters to a global user base

Browse their crawler rules for more details.

Auto updates

Updating a sitemap is vital, when signing up with PRO Sitemap, your sitemap will be automatically crawled, updated and submitted to Google if you choose that option (for Bing and other search engines, you’ll have to submit manually). You’ll also have access to a history of your sitemaps to track changes.

Pricing and plans

PRO Sitemaps pricing is by the page so you can conveniently tailor your plan to your site size.

Pricing starts at $4.19 per month with a yearly subscription, with options scaling based on page indexation needs.

Month-to-month subscription costs range from:

As you can see a large sitemap will cost a pretty penny, going with a yearly subscription saves you about 30% compared to the one-off monthly rates, bringing the cost down to $4.19 per month for up to 1,000 pages and $201.59 per month for up to 2,000,000 pages when billed annually (consider that without a yearly subscription, your total for a site that large would be $3,455.88).

If your site is less than 500 pages, congrats, PRO Sitemaps is free!

With the complimentary account you can generate and submit sitemaps directly from PRO Sitemaps servers, update without the need for re-uploading and handle multiple websites.

Boosting your Google rank with PRO Sitemaps

PRO Sitemaps is a key ally in your quest for a higher Google rank. By facilitating search engines in identifying and indexing every piece of content on your site, PRO Sitemaps improves the site’s discoverability and potential ranking.

Moreover, the feature that allows you to indicate the priority of pages can guide search engine crawlers through the site’s content hierarchy, positively affecting the crawl process (note that Google explicitly says they don’t use sitemap priority and changefreq when they crawl a site, they do use last modification though).

What if your website serves an international audience? Don’t worry, PRO Sitemaps has the solution, providing support for specifying alternate URLs for content in multiple languages, helping search engines serve the right language version to users and enhancing your website’s global reach.

All these lead to improved crawl efficiency, more comprehensive indexing, better search engine visibility and ultimately, higher page rankings.

PRO Sitemaps Connect: WordPress Plugin

For those using WordPress, there’s a plugin just for you — PRO Sitemaps Connect — designed to let you host the XML sitemaps provided by PRO Sitemaps on your own websites.

To use PRO Sitemaps Connect, you must have an active subscription to the PRO Sitemaps service and, naturally, agree to the accompanying Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

The plugin operates by leveraging the PRO Sitemaps API, enabling you to self-host your sitemap on your site.

For other CMSs, you’ll need to use their API.

PRO Sitemaps pros and cons

TL:DR, here are the key advantages and disadvantages of PRO Sitemaps:

Pros

• Desktop version and mobile app
• Free if your site is under 500 pages
• Fully configurable and intuitive
• Link analysis
• Can create many types of sitemaps; XML, RSS feeds, HTML, Text, News, Video and Image

Cons

• No integration with website planning tools like content planning, diagramming and design
• High price tag for lack of broader functionality
• Dated look and basic website
• Not very collaborative
• Only has one CMS plugin
• Seems to be infrequently updated

Choosing the right sitemap generator

Picking the appropriate sitemap generator takes careful consideration.

It’s not just about generating a sitemap but about choosing a tool that aligns with your SEO strategy and can be integrated into your website building and maintenance workflow.

A user-friendly interface is nice, particularly for users with little to no technical expertise. It enables the creation of sitemaps with ease. Moreover, automatic sitemap generators, like PRO Sitemaps, save time by handling large or complex websites efficiently, eliminating the need for manual sitemap creation.

But can it play well with the rest of your operation?

With Slickplan, for example, you can plan and build your entire website with our Sitemap Builder, create and optimize content with our Content Planner and then use our complementary XML sitemap generator. You can also pull a visual sitemap from an existing site with just a URL or XML file.

Another essential factor to consider is compatibility. Make sure your sitemap generator supports a range of formats, including a formatted XML file, HTML and TXT, to fulfill various requirements.

With Slickplan’s Sitemap Builder you can export your sitemap in image, CSV, TXT, HTML, DOCX and XML format.

Also, consider the compatibility with your site’s CMS, PRO Sitemaps has a WordPress plugin. Slickplan has five CMS plugins.

Lastly, remember to assess the cost-effectiveness of different sitemap generators, especially if you have a large website; PRO Sitemaps gets pricey fast.

Is PRO Sitemaps worth it?

In a world where online presence is crucial, a well-structured website sitemap can make all the difference. Will PRO Sitemaps make you a sitemap pro?

Well, it is a versatile tool designed to enhance your website’s SEO by improving its structure, discoverability and search engine indexing.

From being able to output multiple types of sitemap files to managing links to being part of a larger offering of SEO tools from XML-sitemaps.com, PRO Sitemaps does the job pretty well.

However, the price is on the higher side for what’s ultimately a simple tool and only a small part of your SEO efforts.

Our final PRO Sitemaps rating

We give it a 3/5.