What is a sitemap for a website?
A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site, like an outline, helping you organize content, improve SEO and create intuitive navigation.

Optimize UX with a Slickplan sitemap
Chapters +
- Chapter 1 How to define a sitemap
- Chapter 2 What does a sitemap do?
- Chapter 3 What are the different types of sitemaps?
- Chapter 4 What does a sitemap look like?
- Chapter 5 How to use a sitemap based on your job role?
- Chapter 6 Why website sitemap planning is important
- Chapter 7 Do you need a sitemap on your website?
- Chapter 8 How to create a website sitemap for free
- Chapter 9 Sitemap examples & free sitemap templates
- Chapter 10 A brief history of sitemaps & web design
- FAQs Frequently asked questions
- Signup Start creating sitemaps!
Chapter 1
How to define a sitemap
A sitemap gives you a high-level, 30,000-foot view of your website, like an outline or blueprint. They also unleash the ranking potential of your site by making it easier for search engines to index and eliminating SEO obstacles like duplicate content.
Sitemap
Sitemap • [sahyt-map]
A list or visual representation of every page on your site that shows the relationships between them.
noun
"I couldn't find the page I was looking for, so I checked the sitemap"
Synonyms
- site map
- index
- directory
- outline
- roadmap
- floorplan
- blueprint
- site tree
- site contents
- site index
- website map
- site structure
- website index
- site directory
- site hierarchy
Chapter 2
What does a sitemap do?
A sitemap makes your site people-centric by helping you build a user-friendly experience for visitors. Creating a visual sitemap in the form of an organized list or flow chart diagram clearly and cleanly shows you the connections between web pages, web page trees and website content.
Makes communicating ideas about website structure easy
- As a 2D representation of a website, sitemaps allow designers and developers to efficiently develop website projects by offering a bird’s-eye view of the entire thing in one place.
- Simplifies planning and collaboration on website content
- When you know how your site will be laid out, it makes filling in the blanks, i.e., your content, more straightforward.
- Allows you to optimize your site for specific goals
- Just like a roadmap, a sitemap gives your website project direction, helping you lead users to exactly where you want them to go.
Chapter 3
What are the different types of sitemaps?
As you now know, a sitemap is a dynamic tool that needs to be understood by multiple parties – human and, um, not – to yield the greatest benefit in planning.To that end, there are different sitemaps that serve different purposes.
- Visual Sitemap
- HTML Sitemap
- XML Sitemap
- XML Media Sitemap
- RSS Feed
- News Sitemap
Visual Sitemap
- A 2D image or drawing representing the structure of a website.
- Pages are represented as blocks and cells linked together in a hierarchical organizational chart.
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Visual sitemaps are often created with a computer by manually drawing and linking each block or they're reverse-engineered by crawling an existing website.
Excellent for establishing:
- User journeys
- Internal and external links
- Sharpening the overall user experience
HTML Sitemap
- HTML-formatted sitemaps are generally used for human interaction and understanding of page content locations within a website.
- HTML sitemaps should be included as a page on a website as a navigation aid in addition to the menu, they're commonly found linked in the footer.
- Search engine spiders are big fans of seeing HTML sitemaps alongside their XML cousins because it shows your commitment to a user-centric site.
Great as:
- An additional navigational tool for visitors as it's quite literally a page that shows all the pages on your site
XML Sitemap
- An XML, or extensible markup language, formatted list of pages readable by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
- Submitting XML sitemaps to search engines allows for better and more comprehensive website indexing.
- If your pages aren't being indexed by Googlebot and the like, it means they won't come up in search results.
Required for ensuring your website is:
- Properly indexed
- Optimized for search
XML Media Sitemap
- Essentially an extension of an XML sitemap.
- XML media sitemaps allow for better indexing of non-HTML content such as images, videos, PDFs, audio files, etc.
Excellent for:
- Websites with rich media content
RSS Feed
- An XML formatted feed that can be used easily to distribute and read timely website and blog content.
- Typically files on a server that are auto-updated when new content is published to a website.
Perfect for websites that constantly create new content like:
- News outlets
- Active blogs
News Sitemap
- Slightly different from an RSS feed, a news sitemap is a specialized XML-based sitemap used by search engines to aggregate fresh newsworthy content.
- These sitemaps include additional metadata about news content, sources, etc.
Essential if you're publishing content that you want to appear in Google News results
Chapter 4
What does a sitemap look like?
The physical structure of a sitemap can take many shapes and will vary depending on its intended use.
2D sitemaps for planning and collaboration with your team
Just like you'd want your final site to be fit for human consumption, aka simple to navigate for visitors, sitemaps for project planning are visual 2D displays or images that are meant to be quickly and easily understood by the team building your site.
These sitemaps depict individual webpages as blocks or cells connected by lines, representing the internal links or paths that users can take.
It's an incredibly intuitive way for a person to get the big picture.
Human-friendly, website-based sitemaps for user navigation
The classic HTML sitemap is a common feature found on the bottom of many websites.
Unlike the 2D visual sitemap, which is primarily used for internal planning and collaborating on the site plan, an HTML sitemap is specifically designed for your site's visitors and should be easily accessible, normally in the footer.
It essentially serves as an additional navigational tool to your standard menu and provides a visual representation of your site's structure to help visitors steer through your site.
Robot-friendly sitemaps for web crawlers and search engines
Sitemaps optimized for robot consumption aka web crawlers or search engine bots will typically take the form of an XML sitemap file; a structured list of info inside standardized tags forming an outline of key and value pairs.
That's the core difference between an XML vs HTML sitemap and it really is more simple than it sounds.
XML sitemaps may also contain additional page information and content which can be easily interpreted by computers that quickly read it from top to bottom.
Chapter 5
How to use a sitemap based on your job role?
A sitemap isn’t a single-use tool. It’s something that different pros will use in different ways throughout the development process and even after your site is live.
Sitemaps for designers
A sitemap ensures your pages and content stay organized which makes it easier for visitors to navigate and search engines to crawl.
Sitemaps for developers
Working from a sitemap has a couple big benefits, it allows you to get into production faster and makes development more efficient.
Sitemaps for SEOs & marketers
A solid sitemap helps you organize, create and gather content, build an interlinking strategy and guide your audience toward conversions.
Sitemaps for website owners
As an owner, a sitemap is a perfect way to see the entire site structure at a glance, confirming all is well and making it easy to spot issues.
Free demo – See how Slickplan works
Let us show you how easy planning websites can be!
Chapter 6
Why website sitemap planning is important
Can you build a site without planning your sitemap first? Sure. Will it take more iterations and edits? Yep, most likely. A sitemap is your trusty guide.
It's industry best practice
A major benefit to planning websites using visual sitemaps is that it forces your designer to adopt best practices in creating website structures.
Pre-planning in this way is a critical way to ensure that proper steps are taken to organize content for optimal search engine indexing and user navigation. Sitemaps are important for sites of all sizes but are particularly vital for planning large websites.
Simplifies communication
Since they don't require much clicking or reading of long, tedious strings of computer code to get the full picture, visual sitemaps are the best conduit for generating deep insights among your team.
Website plans and strategies can then be more effectively communicated to developers, other team members and clients — resulting in greater end-user satisfaction, more efficient development with fewer mistakes and greater usability of the final product.
Helps make changes & scale
Using sitemaps to plan websites in conjunction with a modern CMS like WordPress allows for greater flexibility as well as future scaling.
New pages can be easily added to existing navigational structures rather than the frequent, common and painful full-site redesigns of yesteryear.
Properly organizing a website's page structure allows for websites to grow organically over time.
Easier innovation & planning
Planning websites using sitemaps drives innovation and brings the ability to rapidly test new ideas. In the earlier days of site planning, designers would frequently piggyback off each other which meant design structures had little variation since it was just quicker and safer to copy (yikes).
Planning websites with sitemaps lets designers test out a variety of website structure scenarios before coding actually begins. This allows for visualizing and optimizing user flow and interaction in advance.
Chapter 7
Do you need a sitemap on your website?
It depends. Some sites, particularly large ones, will benefit greatly from having a sitemap while others, like a simple sales landing page, don’t justify the effort.
Having a blueprint is imperative for building a house, right? Well, a sitemap is the equivalent for your website and without one you're basically building blind.
From content creation to design to SEO, the sitemap plays a massive role in the entire evolution of your site. It's something you'll constantly refer to in the development stages to stay on track, and once you're up and running, you'll update and submit your XML sitemaps to stay relevant in search.
Whether you use our free sitemap generator or go for a 14-day trial of the whole Slickplan suite, a sitemap truly allows you to get the most out of your design and development team en route to crafting a site that's a joy to visit and ranks well; saving time and money in the process.
Use a sitemap if…
- You have a large website
- You're creating a new site
- Your site changes often
- Pages aren't interlinked well
- Your site has tons of rich media
Don't use a sitemap if…
- You don't have many pages
- You're making a one-pager
- You're building a portfolio site
- Search traffic is unimportant
- Your site will never change
Chapter 8
How to create a website sitemap for free
Now that you know what a sitemap is, what they’re for and why they’re important, let’s make one for your site. Get started with Slickplan in less than a minute.
Step 1 Sign up for a free 14-day trial of Slickplan
Takes literally seconds and there's no credit card required. Sign up now

Step 2 Set up your sitemap project in minutes
Start from scratch or use our crawler to crawl your website

Step 3 Collaborate & export your sitemap with ease
Share with your team or migrate straight to your CMS

Slickplan has everything you need to start sitemapping
- Site crawler & XML import
- Diagramming
- Content planning
- WordPress & CMS plugins
- Google Analytics integrated
- UX/UI design sharing
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Chapter 9
Sitemap examples & free sitemap templates
Not sure where to start? No problem, we’ve put together the most common sitemaps as templates, just find the one that suits your needs and get going.
Chapter 10
A brief history of sitemaps & web design
Oddly enough, building sitemaps as a planning strategy for websites is a relatively new concept that only came about in the mid 2000s. The need to pre-plan became much more pronounced as web designers shifted to a content-first philosophy.
Prior to this time, most websites were planned and designed as graphical mockups, page by page, based solely on business requirements. Website project plans consisted of image files representing what each page looked like with additional documentation stored in text files.
Typically, navigation structure was an afterthought. Just a way to link together all of a website’s pages. It was more utilitarian than anything else.
So what is a sitemap in web design then? What’s changed?
- 1990s
- 2000s
- 2010s
- 2020s
1990s

The pre-sitemap era
While sites were still planned and designed (worth a Google), the sitemap itself was a byproduct at the end of the build.

The internet gets its sh*t together
Google introduces Sitemap Protocol 0.84 in 2005 (now 0.90) formally defining sitemap attributes and allowing developers to publish lists of crawlable URLs.

2009 – Slickplan beta released
The first drag and drop sitemap creator ever created as a web application. Nice.

The rise of content-first planning
Sleek, gimmicky websites aren't enough, users demand quality content above all else – design and planning follow suit.

2011 – Slickplan version one officially released
A clean interface and features that allow developers to create a sitemap with tools built specifically for website planning.

2015 – Slickplan adds content gathering and diagram tools
Hearing the content-first call, Slickplan makes it easier to incorporate content into site planning and adds more sophisticated diagramming functionality.

Mobile takes over
With over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile, it's become imperative to plan for mobile.
2021 – Slickplan version two released
Even more highly refined tools purpose-built for site planning, improved access for your whole team to simplify collaboration and straightforward integration with your favorite apps/software to streamline workflow.
With the shift to a content-first strategy, the user became the primary focus of website design planning and the internet is better for it.
Content is now broken into categories and organized to provide the user with peak relevancy and accessibility; intuitive hierarchical organization has become the goal and really the norm nowadays.
This strategy naturally requires the considerable pre-planning of a website's page structures but doing it well is something that's become richly rewarded by search engines.
Designers and developers in effect borrowed tactics from software developers and created the specialized flowcharts we now call sitemaps.
Sitemaps by hand evolved into fully interactive visual diagrams.
By 2012, site mapping as a process was widely adopted by the web design and development industry.
Taking it into the future and moving site mapping to the cloud as we have at Slickplan has allowed us to offer a richer feature set as well as more collaborative workflows.
Free demo – See how Slickplan works
Let us show you how easy planning websites can be!
Frequently asked questions
What is a sitemap URL?
A sitemap URL is the domain at which you'll be able to find the xml version of your sitemap. There are quite a few ways to locate it but in most cases you'll be able to track it down in common locations like:yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
or/sitemap_index.xml
.How do I find my sitemap URL?
Once your sitemap has been submitted, finding the URL is a piece of cake. Between checking common locations, utilizing tools offered by popular search engines, adding plugins to your CMS or using advanced search operators, you have plenty of ways to find the URL for your sitemap.Here are the specifics on how to get it done:- Check the common locations in which the ordinarily live, trying punching in these in after your domain:
/sitemap.xml
(this is where ours is, for example)/sitemap_index.xml
- Use a tool like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools if you have them setup
- Pop into your CMS, which will generally generate a sitemap for you. If yours doesn't, add the Yoast SEO plugin to help find yours
- Look at the Robots.txt file, it might have your sitemap location labeled. Ours is
https://slickplan.com/robots.txt
- Utilize advanced search operators on Google to find submitted sitemaps. Try something like
site:nameofwebsite.com filetype:xml
- Check the common locations in which the ordinarily live, trying punching in these in after your domain:
What is sitemap submission & how does it work?
According to Google, a bit of an authority on search, "'submitting' a sitemap means telling Google where to find it on your site." That's it, that's all. You can do it via Google Search Console by going over to the "Sitemaps" under "Index" in the menu on the left.
What is a sitemap in web design?
A sitemap is the blueprint of your site and a guide for the web design and development process. It outlines the architecture and hierarchy of all your pages which help direct both designers and developers to make decisions that lead to a cleaner, sharper and easier to navigate website.What is a Google sitemap?
There aren't specific sitemaps for each search engine, so a Google sitemap is just a sitemap. They help a search engine like Google crawl and index your site more effectively by telling it which pages are there. The same sitemap that Google uses is compatible with all other search engines.Importantly, this is the XML sitemap we're talking about, not the HTML sitemap you generally see in the footer of websites. Search engines need the XML sitemap but they like seeing the HTML there too.What is a sitemap in SEO?
Search engines love seeing sitemaps, specifically an XML sitemap because it makes your site much easier to crawl and index. The easier to index, the more you can improve your search rank, plus, sitemaps can help you pinpoint issues related to the search engine's indexing process.
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