Create a sitemap in Webflow

Similar to a table of contents, a sitemap is a page that contains links to various pages of your site which search engines and site visitors use to access your site’s content. Search engine crawlers follow the paths provided in the sitemap to index site pages and make them available in search engine results. 

When you host your site with Webflow, you can automatically generate an XML sitemap or add your own. 

To learn more, check out SEO and Webflow: the essential guide. 

In this lesson, you’ll learn: 

1. How to auto-generate a sitemap
2. How to add a custom sitemap
3. How to customize the root domain in your sitemap.xml address
4. How to submit your sitemap to Google

How to auto-generate a sitemap

Webflow’s auto-generated sitemap feature automatically generates a sitemap.xml for your site and updates it each time you publish your site. 

For sites with Localization enabled, the auto-generated sitemap includes hreflang tags for all static and dynamic pages on your site to help search engines understand the available language and region variants of your site content. Learn more about sitemap hreflang tags.

To enable the auto-generate sitemap feature: 

1. Visit Site settings > SEO tab > Sitemap section
2. Toggle Auto-generate sitemap to “Yes” to enable the auto-generated sitemap 
3. Click Save changes
4. Publish your site 

Important: Make sure to set a default domain, as the sitemap will reflect the domain you’ve set as the default. Otherwise, search engine crawlers will hit a 301 Redirect status when they attempt to crawl the URLs in your sitemap, which indicates to them that the original pages do not exist. 

Note: It isn’t possible to delete the /sitemap.xml page once you’ve created your sitemap and published your site. 

How to add a custom sitemap

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

Note that if you use a custom sitemap for sites with Localization enabled, you’ll need to manually add hreflang tags for each page, or consider custom code alternatives. Learn more about sitemap hreflang tags.

To add your own custom sitemap to your site: 

1. Visit Site settings > SEO tab > Sitemap section
2. Toggle Auto-generate sitemap to “No” to disable the auto-generated sitemap 
3. Paste your custom sitemap in the Custom sitemap.xml field
4. Click Save changes
5. Publish your site

Important: Whether you create or auto-generate your sitemap, Webflow automatically adds your sitemap.xml address to your site’s robots.txt file. If you manually add your sitemap to your site’s robots.txt file, the file will contain 2 sitemaps for search engines to crawl.

Note: It isn’t possible to delete the /sitemap.xml page once you’ve created your sitemap and published your site. 

How to customize the root domain in your sitemap.xml address 

Note: This feature is only available to Webflow Enterprise customers. If you or a client are interested in learning more, please contact our Enterprise sales team. 

If you use a reverse proxy to connect multiple Webflow sites to a single domain, you may have run into SEO challenges with the automatically generated sitemap.xml address Webflow creates within your robots.txt file. You can remove the default sitemap.xml address and input your own to ensure search engines understand your sites are part of the same domain. 

To remove the default sitemap.xml address and add your own: 

1. Go to Site settings > SEO tab > Indexing section
2. Toggle Remove sitemap.xml from robots.txt to “Yes” to remove the auto-generated sitemap from your robots.txt file
3. Enter the sitemap for your root domain in the robots.txt field
4. Click Save changes
5. Publish your site

How to submit your sitemap to Google

Once you’ve generated your sitemap, you’ll need to tell Google about your sitemap by submitting it to Google Search Console.

Good to know: Google may automatically find and index your website through a link on another site, but verifying ownership of your site, submitting a sitemap, and manually requesting that Google index your site can typically speed up the process.

To submit your sitemap: 

1. Open Google Search Console
2. Choose the property (website) you want to submit the sitemap for
3. Type sitemap.xml into the input field 
4. Click Submit