Recently we added a Sitemap to our blog. We thought we’d do that before we added too many posts to our site, which then would make the task of adding them to the Sitemap onerous. Of course, that thought crossed our minds when we thought we would have to manually create the Sitemap and manually maintain it.

Well, before we went too far down this road, we thought we’d see if there was a WordPress plugin that would do this for us. And what do you know, yes there are, several as a matter of fact. It turns out that we ended up loading 2 plugins, the first of which we’ll describe here.

Before we began our search, we determined our criteria for the plugin:

1. The plugin should automatically create our Sitemap for the posts we’ve already written.
2. The plugin should automatically add any new posts to the Sitemap, without our intervention. This way, the sitemap is always up to date.
3. The Sitemap appearance should be easy to read! Posts should be organized in a logical fashion.

We searched the WordPress Plugin Directory and found the plugin Dagon Design Sitemap Generator, written by Dagon Design. This plugin is available for free. At the time of writing this post, the latest version available is 3.15, which is compatible for WordPress 2.1 or higher. Also, this plugin has been downloaded more than 79,000 times!

This plugin goes through your site and finds any pages and/or posts, and groups the pages under a Pages heading, and the posts under the category they exist under. Have a look at our Sitemap to see what we mean. Anytime you add a new page or post, it will appear automatically on your Sitemap.

Installation and Configuration

Installing the plugin is very straightforward. You just have to download the entire plugin folder into your /wp-content/plugins folder, and activate it in the usual manner. You can refer to our previous post on How to Research, Choose and Install Plugins for more details on how to do this.

After you activate the plugin, you need to configure it. Go to your WordPress Settings, and click on DDSitemapGen. Some of the configuration options available to you are:

• Ability to add pages and/or posts to your Sitemap.
• Ability to not display certain pages or categories on your Sitemap. In order to use these features, you will need to enter the Page or Category IDs; this is not the Page or Category name, or the slugs, but rather the actual database IDs. (Note: you will have to dig into the database to find out what Page or Category IDs are assigned to each of your pages and categories in order to use this feature. If you need help on this, send us a comment and we’ll provide more details.)
  • Example: we didn’t want to display the “Uncategorized” default category that comes with WordPress, so we entered the Category ID of 1 into this field.
• Ability to determine whether pages or posts are shown first on your Sitemap.
• Ability to sort posts by their title or the post date (ascending or descending order).
• Ability to sort pages by their title, the post date, or the menu order of the pages.
• Ability to define how much text can appear on one page of your Sitemap.
• Ability to add page navigation to your Sitemap, and have it appear at the top, bottom or both the top and bottom of the Sitemap.
• Ability to show the number of comments and/or posted dates after each page or post.

This isn’t a complete list, but these are probably the most popular configuration options you will use. Once you’ve selected what options you want, simply hit the Update Options at the bottom of the page.

One final step in the configuration is to decide where the show the Sitemap. We added a ‘page’ to our site called Sitemap. On this page, you only need one line of HTML code to have the sitemap generate. This is all you need to add to that page:

DDSitemapGen HTML Code

Now save your page, and that’s it! Congratulations. Your Sitemap is now up and running.

Cheers!