Do I Need a Sitemap for a Small Website?

The honest answer

For a ten-page site with a normal navigation menu, a sitemap does close to nothing. Every page is one or two clicks from the homepage, so a crawler arriving at your homepage finds everything without help.

Google's own framing supports this. Its documentation says submitting a sitemap "is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site." It is a discovery aid, not an indexing instruction.

So if someone is telling you a missing sitemap is why your small site is not ranking, they are wrong, and the real cause is somewhere else.

When it does matter

Four situations, and small sites can fall into some of them.

• Many pages, where crawling everything by following links takes a long time
• Weak internal linking, where pages exist that nothing points at
• Deep pages, buried four or five clicks from the homepage
• New pages you want found quickly rather than eventually
• A site with no external links pointing at it at all, where crawlers have little reason to visit often

The orphan page test

Here is the check that actually tells you whether you need one, and it is more useful than counting pages.

List the pages you believe exist. Then ask, for each one, which other page on your site links to it. If you find pages nothing links to, those are orphans, and a sitemap is the only way a crawler will reach them.

But note what that really means. An orphan page is a page your own site treats as unimportant, and putting it in a sitemap papers over that rather than fixing it. The better move is usually to link to it properly from somewhere relevant. If it does not deserve a link from anywhere, it is worth asking whether it deserves to exist.

This was the exact situation on this website until recently: over two hundred pages were reachable only through the sitemap, with nothing linking to them. Adding hub pages and internal links did more than the sitemap ever had.

You probably have one regardless

This is the part that makes the question mostly academic for most people.

WordPress core has published a sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5, so a WordPress site has one whether or not anyone decided to. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and Webflow all generate sitemaps automatically. Most SEO plugins produce a better one.

So rather than deciding whether to build a sitemap, check whether you already have one and whether it works. Our sitemap checker answers both in a few seconds, and finding a broken one is far more common than finding none.

Common questions