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How to generate an XML Sitemap for a Jekyll site in Shopify

Sam Updated: February 27, 2024

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You may know that Sitemap is very important in SEO for any websites. So what is a sitemap exactly and why you need it?

A sitemap is known as a file in which you are capable of listing the web pages to tell Google and many other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers such as Googlebot read this file to crawl your website more intelligently.

Actually, there are a couple of different kinds of sitemaps such as a visual one which you are able to create before building a website, but in this instruction, we are going to focus on the one that is considered important for SEO. In details, it is known as an XML sitemap and it is just a list of the pages on your website. Imagine it is a map for your website, the fact is that it can show all the information on your webpages.

However, please keep reading our instructional writing on How to generate an XML Sitemap for a Jekyll site to know more deeply about this topic.

How to generate an XML Sitemap for a Jekyll site

What is a Sitemap?
Way to create an XML Sitemap for your Jekyll site
- Installation
- Configuration

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML file that allows listing all the existing links on URL, a model of a website’s content which was designed to help both search engines and users navigate the site. As explained above, a sitemap can be a hierarchical list of pages (with links, as usual) that are organized by the topic, an XML document which provides instructions to search engine crawl bots, or an organization chart. For users, a sitemap is just a plain HTML file with a listing of many major pages on a website. For search engines, it is known as a sitemap.xml file that could help search engine crawlers index all pages on the site. Particularly, sitemaps are very important for sites that use JavaScript or Adobe Flash menus which do not contain HTML links.

It can help the search engine to crawl the URL of the website strategically. Sitemaps are considered an essential feature in doing SEO for any website. A perfect SEO strategy should include a sitemap that crawls all new and uploaded links or pages.

Way to create an XML Sitemap for your Jekyll site

It is very easy to generate a sitemap on your Jekyll site with the jekyll-sitemap plugin.

Installation

Step 1: Create a Gemfile if you do not already have one.
Step 2: Add jekyll-sitemap to the jekyll_plugins group in your Gemfile:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'jekyll', '3.3.1'

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-sitemap'
end

Step 3: Run bundle install.

Configuration

Exclude

You are able to exclude particular pages from the sitemap by setting sitemap to false in the front mater.

sitemap: true

Last modified

You are able to set the last modified date in the front matter of a post using last_modified_at.

last_modified_at: 2017-02-09

Usage

The sitemap will automatically be generated by jekyll-sitemap at /sitemap.xml.

Conclusion

We hope that now you have known exactly what a Sitemap is and how to install it!

Catalog

How to modify the shipping calculator HTML How to add the gift-wrapping snippet in your cart template How to modify your theme.liquid file How to insert some JavaScript to your theme Delete the author's name in your theme Generate a currencies snippet Insert the search box on your Jekyll site using lunr.js How to hide sold out variants for nonsectioned themes Liquid Variables: assign, capture, increment, increment Liquid paginate: Split into multiple pages Update the product form to support dynamic checkout buttons Select which page to show when customers log in to your online store Modify the code for your payment icons Insert the security badge code to your theme Insert Disqus to your blog Insert breadcrumb navigation to your store Get consent for promotional emails during customer registration Generate your snippet generate the How did you hear about us form field Generate and include an age-check snippet Generate a back-to-the-top snippet Edit correct quantities on the cart page silently Apply a class to your templates Update item quantity fields in the cart Update the collection-template.liquid file Modify the theme code to add the shipping calculator Insert the notification form code to your theme Insert custom fields to your theme's customer registration form Add Custom Fields to Contact Form in Shopify Insert a form field to your theme code

Sam Nguyen

Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.