Adding a site map helps visitors (and search engines) to find more of your content and is a great resource for people who experience difficulties navigating around your site. They can just visit the site map and click on where they want to go on your site.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to add an HTML site map to your WordPress website or blog.

Adding An HTML Site Map To Your WordPress Site

A “site map” (not to be confused with sitemap) is a regular web page containing links to other pages on your site that can be read by humans and search bots alike.

A site map can also help drive more visitors to your site by earning you free organic links from various assistive technologies and bots that roam the net looking for content or reference sites.

Building A Site Map

You can build a site map manually simply by creating a new page and then adding links on the new page to your main site pages, or even links to your category pages (which will then display content organized by categories). To improve search engine optimization and create a better experience for your site users, you could also include a short description of the content your visitors can expect to see when they click on the links.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a site map on your WordPress site for your visitors that will self-update automatically whenever new content is added, using a WordPress plugin called Dagon Design SiteMap Plus – an HTML sitemap plugin.

Dagon Design SiteMap Plugin

This plugin adds an HTML sitemap plugin to your WordPress site quickly and easily.

Plugin URL

Go here to download the plugin:

http://www.dagondesign.com/files/sitemap-generator.zip

Plugin Description

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress-powered site. This is not an XML sitemap plugin but a true sitemap generator, which can be customized from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel.

Some of the plugin’s features include:

Support for multi-level categories and pages
Category/page exclusion
Multiple-page generation with navigation
Permalink support
Choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Plugin Configuration

If you haven’t already activated this plugin, then scroll down your WP admin sidebar menu and click on Plugins …

Activate the “Dagon Design Sitemap Generator” plugin …

Step 1 – Create A Site Map Page

Before you can generate your site map using the plugin, you will need to create a page on your site to display the site map content.

Go to Pages > Add New …

Create a page with the title “Site Map” and make sure that the slug of your new page is “site-map” (without the quotes) …

Select the “Text” editor option (NOT the “Visual” editor tab) and paste the shortcode below into the body of your new page:

<!– ddsitemapgen –>

This shortcode instructs the plugin to insert the site map data into this page …

Note: Below your Post editor area, make sure that the “Discussion” box is enabled and uncheck the “allow comments” and “allow trackbacks and pingbacks” options …

Also, make sure to add your “meta data” to the WordPress SEO section if you have already installed and configured the Yoast SEO plugin …

Click Publish when finished to create the page …

Step 2 – Configure Your Plugin Settings

Now that your site map page has been created (http://www.yourdomain.com/site-map)

Go to Settings > DDSitemapGen …

Configure the plugin settings as shown below:

General Options

Enter your “Sitemap page slug“.

If you are using the settings recommended in this tutorial, then enter “site-map” (without the quotes) into this field. This needs to match the “slug” or permalink that appears at the end of your site map URL exactly (eg: http://www.yourdomain.com/site-map) …

Sitemap Generation

Configure the settings in this section according to your own preferences. The screenshot below shows a recommended configuration for this section …

Exclusions

If you do not want certain categories or pages to be included in your sitemap, then enter the ID of the categories or pages you want excluded from the sitemap in this section (if you need help with this step, see this tutorial: How To Find Your WordPress Post Or Page Id).

Additionally,

Check: Hide future-dated posts
Check: Hide password-protected items

Note: See the “Additional Plugin Information” section at the end of this tutorial:

If you have specified one of your pages to be the permanent homepage of your site, or
If there are pages on your site that you would like to include in your sitemap, but not display to visitors on your site’s navigational menus.

Navigation

Configure the settings in this section according to your own preferences. The screenshot below shows a recommended configuration for this section …

Miscellaneous

Enter the “Full path to XML sitemap” value.

You currently have two options:

http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml – choose this option to use the XML sitemap from the WordPress SEO Plugins tutorial
http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml – choose this option to use the XML sitemap from the Google XML Sitemap Generator tutorial

Use either the XML sitemap created in the WordPress SEO Plugins tutorial to your robots.txt file or the XML sitemap created using the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin into this section. You don’t need two XML sitemaps.

Additional settings:

“Where to show XML sitemap link:” – Set this to “At the end of every page“
Check: “Sitemap links open in new window“

Click Update options to save your changes …

Step 3 – Add A Link To Your Site Map On Your Site Footer

Now that you have configured your plugin settings, the next step is to add a link to your site map page on the footer section of your WordPress theme.

This will help search engines find and crawl all the pages listed in your site map …

Depending on your server’s settings and your WordPress theme, you can modify your footer.php file either by:

Adding the code directly to your footer.php file, then uploading the file to your server and overwriting the existing file (always make a back up of your files before making any changes), or
Editing content on your footer file directly through the Appearance > Editor menu inside your WP-admin area.

Also, we recommend adding a link to your site map on your sidebar navigation menu …

Load your website into a web browser window and click on the site map link to make sure that your site map display correctly …

If you don’t see your site map displayed on your Site Map page, check that you have entered the site map shortcode correctly into your page’s text editor tab.

The shortcode should look like this …

Not this …

The error shown above happens when you paste the code into the “Visual” editor tab instead of the “Text” tab …

Your plugin is now fully configured.

Plugin Usage Instructions

You don’t need to do anything further after configuring this plugin. When new content gets added to your site, a link pointing to new posts or pages published on your site will automatically be added to your site map.

Additional Plugin Information

Should You Include Your Index Page In Your Sitemap?

WordPress lets you to set any page of your site as the “home page” (see this tutorial: How To Display Any WordPress Page As Your Home Page).

If you set a WordPress page as the “home page” of your site, WordPress internally redirects the URL of that page to point to your main domain.

So, for example, let’s say that you create a page with a URL like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/travel-tips/how-to-choose-the-best-2-for-1-cruise-deals

If you set the above page as your home page, the page will display as shown below when visitors type the URL shown below into their browsers:

http://www.mydomain.com

In this situation, excluding your site’s default index page link from being listed on your site map can help prevent your index page being seen by Google as “duplicate content“.

To exclude your site’s default index page from being included in your sitemap, do the following:

Go to Pages > All Pages in your WordPress administration area …

Locate the page you’ve specified as your site’s index page and hover your mouse over its title …

Note down the ‘Post ID’ value displayed in the status bar of your browser window. (In the example above, the post ID is “26”) …

Go to Settings > DDSitemapGen …

Scroll down to the Exclusions section, and enter the ‘post id’ value (e.g. “26”) into the “Excluded pages:” field …

Click Update options to save your changes …

For more information about the Dagon Sitemap plugin, visit the plugin website:

http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/