Sitemap

When you set up custom domain hosting with Webflow, you can automatically generate an XML sitemap — one key element of your site’s SEO. An XML sitemap shows Google’s spiders how and where to crawl your site. They are located at your site's root level: your-site.com/sitemap.xml.

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In this lesson

Creating and submitting a sitemap for your Webflow project is easy and can be done in two steps:

1. Generating your sitemap
2. Submitting your sitemap to Google

Generating your sitemap

You can enable the auto-generated sitemap of each project in the Project settings of that project. The setting is located in Project settings →SEO tab → Sitemap section. Make sure to save the changes and publish your site.

Once you've done that, Webflow will automatically generate the sitemap.xml of that project and update it each time you publish your site.

Custom sitemap

If you prefer to write your own custom sitemap.xml, you can and add that to your Webflow project.

1. Disable the auto-generated sitemap by switching the Auto-generate sitemap toggle to "No"
2. Paste your custom sitemap.xml in the text area
3. Save and publish

Submitting your sitemap to Google

Now, generating a sitemap alone isn't enough. You'll need to tell Google about your sitemap, and you can do that in one of two ways:

• Add your sitemap in your site's robots.txt file (only if you have disabled Webflow's auto-generated sitemap)
• Submit the sitemap using the Search Console tools

Good to know

• Google may automatically find your website through a link on another site, but verifying ownership, submitting a sitemap, and asking Google to index your site will get you on Google faster.

Add your sitemap in your site's robots.txt file

If you are using a custom sitemap and you have disabled Webflow's auto-generated sitemap, you can tell Google about your sitemap without leaving the comfort of your Webflow dashboard. Just type the path to your sitemap in your robots.txt file which is located right above the sitemap settings under Project settings > SEO under the Indexing section.

• Sitemap: https://your-site.com/sitemap.xml

Make sure to replace your-site.com with the actual domain your site is published on.

Note: Do not enter your sitemap link into the robots.text field if you are using Webflow's auto-generated sitemap, otherwise your robots.txt file will contain 2 sitemaps for search engines to crawl.

Submit the sitemap using the Search Console tools

Whether you've created a custom sitemap or are using Webflow's auto-generated sitemap, you can submit your sitemap through your Google Search Console. Choose the property (website) you want to submit the sitemap of, then Type “sitemap.xml” into the input field and press “submit”.