Submitting your site to search engines like Google and Bing is required to get more organic traffic to your site. Though search engine crawlers automatically crawl each page on the website, this may take many days for the new content to appear on search results. The solution is inform search engines instantly when new content is published on your site. XML Sitemap is the easy to inform search engines when new articles are published. Most of the modern day site builder tools automatically generate Sitemap for you. If your site builder does not generate a Sitemap, here is a free solution for you.

This free XML Sitemap generator will help you to create a Sitemap up to 5000 URLs. After generating the Sitemap, you can easily download the file in XML format to your local computer.

Below is the explanation to fill the fields in the tool:

1. Domain Name

The domain name is mandatory in the Sitemap. Ensure to enter the correct domain name and the example is "mysite.com". The tools will automatically crawl the complete URL of your domain like "https://www.mysite.com/". 

2. Modified Date

This is the date that the specific URL is modified last time. Choose one of the options from drop down. Just select "Do not include" if you don't want the modified date to be part of your Sitemap. Selecting "Todays date" will automatically add current date to the Sitemap. Select "Custom date" to enter the desired date in next text box in dd/mm/yyyy format.

3. Change Frequency

Select the frequency of content change on your site. The available options are - None, Always, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly. If you publish blog posts daily then choose "Daily" option, otherwise "Weekly" option should be sufficient in general.

4. Default Priority

Select the priority between 0 to 1 range, choose none if you don't want to include. This is an indication used to inform search engines about the important pages on your site. 

5. Number of Pages

Choose the number of pages to be included in the Sitemap from the dropdown. You can generate less than 50 pages to maximum of 5000 pages to be included in the Sitemap. At this moment, the tool does not support larger sites with 5K+ pages.

• Click on the "Generate Sitemap" button to see the Sitemap content online.
• Click on the "Save As XML File" button to download the "sitemap.xml" file to your local Mac or PC.
• Click on the "Try New URL" to go back to the initial screen.

Below is how the generated Sitemap will look like. We have just given only one URL for example, the total number of URLs depend on the number of pages on your site as well as the option you select in the tool.

Read more on XML Sitemap structure.

Sitemap file should be uploaded into the root directory of your site (generally "/public_html/"). This can be done using FTP or File Manager option through cPanel hosting account. If you are not clear where to upload your Sitemap then get in touch with your hosting company to help you.

Once you have uploaded the Sitemap, ensure that the file can be accessed in browser using the URL "https://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml".

Remember, XML Sitemap will be generated automatically in most of the latest content management systems like WordPress. You should use this tool, primarily for the static sites made with framework like Bootstrap.

The final step is to submit your Sitemap URL to search engines through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools account. You need to register have Google and Microsoft email accounts in order to use these free tools.