Where to Find Yoast Sitemap Settings in WordPress

In WordPress, Yoast SEO’s sitemap settings control whether Yoast creates a sitemap and which site content it lists. A sitemap is an XML file, a structured file that helps search engines find URLs. Yoast’s sitemap index is the main file and links to separate child sitemap files, which list content such as posts or pages.

Go to WordPress Dashboard → Yoast SEO → Settings → Site features → Technical SEO → XML sitemaps to turn sitemap generation on or off. Choose the relevant Content types, Categories & tags, and Advanced settings to control which content appears. After you save a change, open the sitemap index and check the relevant child sitemap to confirm that Yoast made the change.

Turn Yoast sitemap generation on or off

Open Yoast SEO → Settings → Site features → Technical SEO → XML sitemaps. This screen controls Yoast’s site-wide XML sitemap feature. Turn the setting on to generate Yoast sitemaps, or off to stop generating them. The screen also provides View the XML sitemap, which opens the sitemap index. Yoast documents these controls in its XML sitemap settings instructions.

This switch turns sitemap generation on or off for the whole site. It does not choose which content types appear. Use the settings below for that.

Choose which content appears

Under Yoast SEO → Settings → Content types, check the setting for each type of content, such as posts or pages. This setting tells Yoast whether that content type appears in search results, which determines whether it appears in its sitemap. Site-specific content types, called custom post types, may also appear here when the site makes them public.

Under Yoast SEO → Settings → Categories & tags, review the search-results settings for categories, tags, and other taxonomies, which group content. Categories and tags are common examples. Yoast includes a taxonomy in the sitemap when its setting says it should appear in search results. Yoast’s sitemap customization instructions explain how these settings affect the sitemap index.

Use Yoast SEO → Settings → Advanced to review archive settings, including author archives. Archive pages group content around a subject, such as an author. If you disable author archives, Yoast also removes the author sitemap. Decide whether visitors should be able to access those archive pages.

A setting for one post type or taxonomy affects the entire content group. To exclude one post, page, or other item, open it in the editor and use Advanced in the Yoast SEO sidebar or meta box to mark the item noindex. “Noindex” tells search engines to leave that URL out of search results. Yoast also leaves noindexed items out of its sitemap. Users without editor or administrator permissions may not see this control. See Yoast’s instructions for noindexing URLs.

Verify the sitemap index after a change

Save the setting you changed, then open View the XML sitemap or visit https://your-domain.example/sitemap_index.xml. Replace the example with your site’s domain and whether it uses HTTP or HTTPS. Yoast’s sitemap index links to child sitemaps; it does not necessarily list every URL directly.

Check that the index loads as XML and that it contains links to the expected child sitemaps. If you changed a content type or taxonomy setting, open its child sitemap and confirm that the section appears or disappears as intended. If you changed one item’s noindex setting, check the relevant child sitemap for that item.

A sitemap’s response may include an X-Robots-Tag header with noindex, follow. That header tells search engines not to index the sitemap file itself; it does not prevent them from reading the URLs listed in it. A correctly loading sitemap confirms the output, but it does not prove that a search engine has crawled or indexed every listed page.

If the sitemap is blank or shows an error

If the index is blank or still shows old content after you save a change, clear relevant caches, which store copies of site data, and check again. Yoast’s blank sitemap troubleshooting also recommends turning the sitemap feature off and back on to reset its cache.

If the sitemap URL returns an error or an unexpected page, check whether a redirect or a server rule that changes URLs affects it. Yoast also lists WordPress permalink settings as a possible cause. If Yoast has not created the sitemap, saving the permalink settings without changing them can help. For troubleshooting these errors, see Yoast’s common sitemap error guidance.

Use the sitemap_index.xml address when checking Yoast’s sitemap. A file named sitemap.xml may come from WordPress or another plugin, so its presence alone does not confirm that Yoast’s sitemap feature is working.

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