Sitemap Validator

What Is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a file you place on your web server that lists every page you want search engines to know about. Think of it as a table of contents for your website — instead of waiting for Googlebot to discover pages by crawling links, you hand it a complete list upfront.

A basic sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page-one</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-01-15</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/page-two</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-02-20</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>

Only <loc> (the URL) is required. The other elements are optional hints to search engines.

Why Validate Your Sitemap?

A broken sitemap is often worse than having no sitemap at all — search engines may partially process it and skip pages, or simply reject it. Common errors that our validator catches:

XML syntax errors — Unclosed tags, invalid characters, or encoding issues that make the sitemap unparseable.

Missing namespace declaration — The xmlns attribute on <urlset> must point to the sitemap protocol URL exactly.

Relative URLs — All <loc> values must be absolute URLs including the protocol (https://). Relative paths like /blog/post-1 are invalid.

URLs exceeding 2,048 characters — The sitemap protocol has a hard limit on URL length. Longer URLs are silently ignored.

Dates in wrong format — <lastmod> must use W3C date format: YYYY-MM-DD or the full ISO 8601 datetime YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD.

Invalid priority values — <priority> must be a decimal between 0.0 and 1.0. Values outside this range will cause the sitemap to be rejected.

Invalid changefreq values — Must be one of: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never. Anything else is invalid.

URLs from different domains — All URLs must be from the same domain (and subpath) as the sitemap itself.

Sitemap Size Limits

If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you need a sitemap index file — a sitemap that lists multiple sub-sitemaps. Each sub-sitemap can list up to 50,000 URLs.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="htt...