Sitemap
A structured list of a site's pages and their hierarchy — used both as a design artefact and as an XML file that tells search engines what exists.
Deliverables & ArtifactsThe two meanings share a name for a reason. The design sitemap documents the page hierarchy that comes out of information architecture work, and it drives navigation, URL structure and internal linking. The XML sitemap is the machine-readable version at `/sitemap.xml`, listing canonical URLs with last-modified dates so crawlers can discover and prioritise pages.
For SEO the XML file should be generated from the same source of truth that publishes the pages, not maintained by hand — a hand-written sitemap drifts within one release and starts advertising URLs that 404. Every listed URL should be canonical, indexable and return 200; anything else spends crawl budget teaching search engines about pages you do not want ranked.
In practice
A site's sitemap was generated at build time from a cached snapshot. Before: three published articles were missing and one deleted page was still listed. After generating from the CMS on every revalidation, the file matched what was actually published. The catch — stale build caches will silently reintroduce the problem unless the cache is keyed to content.
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You may ask
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an XML sitemap if my site is small?
It rarely hurts and it helps discovery of pages with few internal links. For a well-linked ten-page site the benefit is small; for anything with programmatic or deep pages it is genuinely useful.
Should every page be in the sitemap?
Only pages you want indexed. Exclude thin pages, duplicates, paginated variants and anything noindexed — including them dilutes crawl budget and sends mixed signals about what matters.
Related terms
All terms- Information ArchitectureThe structure of a product's content and navigation — how things are grouped, labelled and related so people can find what they need.
- User FlowA diagram of the path a user takes through an interface to finish one task, including every decision point, branch and error state.
- WireframingSketching the structure of a screen — what goes where, at what priority — deliberately without colour, type or imagery.
- UX AuditA structured review of an existing product against usability, accessibility and business criteria, producing a prioritised list of problems and fixes.
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