WordPress, a content management system that runs one-third of today's websites on the Internet, will bring built-in support for XML sitemaps.
The new feature will come with WordPress 5.5, which is scheduled to be released later this fall.
XML sitemaps are special files that contain a list of all the web pages, blog posts, tags, categories, etc. Search engines like Google, Bing, and others use sitemaps to indexing the content of a site. Sitemaps usually use the XML format which is the most widely used.
Since its release in 2003, WordPress has not supported the creation XML sitemaps, a feature usually offered by third-party plugins until now.
Most of today's WordPress webmasters use one additional SEO or some sitemap-generator plugin to create XML maps that search engines need.
"With version 5.5, WordPress will have a sitemap in /wp-sitemap.xml. This XML file will contain a list of all the pages on a WordPress site, ”says the WordPress team.
"The robots.txt file in WordPress will display the XML sitemap so that it can be easily found by search engines."
Work to add built-in support for XML sitemaps to WordPress master code began last year following repeated requests from users in recent years.
According to the WordPress developer team, every website WordPress will have a central sitemap file, which will be able to display up to 50.000 adjacent XML sitemaps, each with a capacity of up to 2.000 entries, to index different types of content.
"By default, sitemaps will be created for all types of public posts and taxonomies, for publisher files per author publisher and of course the site homepage," says the WordPress team.
In addition, WordPress sitemaps will also be compatible with the templates used by all major search engines such as Google and Bing. This will allow site owners to have their content ready for indexing as soon as it is published.
Additional technical details are available at official announcement of the WordPress team.
