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 website pages, blog posts, tags, categories, etc. The engines search like Google, Bing and others use sitemaps to index a website's content. Sitemaps usually use the XML format which is the most widely used.
Since its release in 2003, WordPress does not support the creation of XML sitemaps, a feature they usually offer plugins third parties until now.
Most WordPress webmasters today use some SEO plugin or sitemap-generator plugin to create the 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, each WordPress site will have a central sitemap file, which can display up to 50.000 adjacent XML sitemaps, each with a capacity of up to 2.000 entries, for indexing different types of content.
"From beforechoice, sitemaps will be created for all public post types and taxonomies, post archives by author publisher, and of course the site's home page,” the WordPress team says.
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.
