Creating a Sitemap

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.

Install

To generate an XML sitemap, you will use the gatsby-plugin-sitemap package. To install this package, run the following command: npm install --save gatsby-plugin-sitemap

How to use gatsby-plugin-sitemap

Once installation is complete, we can now add this plugin to our gatsby-config.js, like so:

module.exports = {
  siteMetadata: {
    siteUrl: `https://www.example.com`,
  },
  plugins: [`gatsby-plugin-sitemap`],
}

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 of course the plugin exposes options to configure this default functionality.

Additional Modification

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