Firstly, what's a sitemap?
A sitemap is a list of all the pages of your website. It’s used to tell search engines how your site is organised and what content it includes. Search engine bots (or web crawlers) use this file to crawl your site more efficiently.
Do I need a sitemap?
It’s not essential to have a site map, since the bots will crawl your site anyway. However, submitting a sitemap can help Google (and other search engines) index your pages more efficiently. See
this Google Search Console support document for more information about this.
Okay, but I thought I’d submitted a sitemap and now someone is telling me that I don’t have one!
However, some sitemap submitting tools use a different structure. For example, many Performance Foundry clients use a plugin called
Yoast for SEO, and this plugin includes a sitemap tool. Sitemaps created through Yoast are located at
https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml.
If you’ve checked both places and can’t find your sitemap, contact us and we’ll look into it for you.