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Hey! Are you looking to sort out your sitemap on your BigCommerce store? You’re in luck!
In this video, I’m going to show you everything you need to know about sitemaps on BigCommerce.
Before we get started, my name is Kal. I’m a developer and a store owner, just like you, and BigCommerce is my jam! If you find this video helpful, hit the subscribe button to see more helpful content.
Alright, let me share my screen and let’s talk about sitemaps.
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There are two types of sitemaps, and people often forget about one. There’s a visual sitemap and an XML sitemap. I’m going to show you both on this BigCommerce store.
If I scroll down, most BigCommerce stores out of the box have a link in the footer to their visual sitemap. Here’s what it looks like on this theme. It’s nothing special, but it has all of your top-level links for pages, categories, and brands.
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Basically, the idea is that if a human wants to see how your site is laid out, they can come here. But more importantly, search engine crawlers will see this link in the footer and use it to find all your pages. This is great for SEO. You don’t need to do anything about it, but I wanted you to know it exists. This visual sitemap lives at /sitemap.php — it’s the same URL for every BigCommerce store. You can’t change it, it’s always there, helping your SEO.
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The other type of sitemap is the XML sitemap. This is the sitemap that you want to send to Google.
BigCommerce has an article called “Locating Your Sitemap,” which provides some info. Most frameworks use sitemap.xml as the default URL for this, but BigCommerce uses a slightly unusual format: XMLsitemap.php.
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To access your XML sitemap, add /XMLsitemap.php to the end of your URL. I’ll include this link in the video description so you don’t have to search for it.
When you access this page, it’ll look something like this. It contains a list of all your URLs. This page serves as a cheat sheet for Google and other crawlers, showing them where to find all your content.
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The XML sitemap contains subpages for different content types like Pages, Products, Categories, Brands, and News (your blog). The reason BigCommerce breaks it up this way is that Google has a limit on how large a sitemap can be. If your sitemap is too large, Google might not crawl all of it, or it could get stuck. You don’t need to give Google all these links; just provide the main XML sitemap link, and it’ll figure out the rest.
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Now, let me show you how to submit this sitemap to Google.
Go to Google Search Console at search.google.com, and head to your domain property. I won’t cover setting up your domain property in this video, but once it’s set up, go to the Indexing section and find Sitemaps.
Paste everything after the slash, specifically XMLsitemap.php, and click Submit. You can see that I’ve already submitted mine, and Google has crawled over 9,400 URLs from it, which is great!
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Another thing you can do is add your sitemap to your robots.txt file. To do this, type /robots.txt after your domain, and you’ll see your robots.txt file. This file is usually used to tell crawlers what not to index, like your cart, checkout, or login pages.
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You can add a line to tell crawlers about your sitemap, which looks like this:
sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/XMLsitemap.php
Adding this ensures that when a crawler visits your robots.txt file, it’ll also find your sitemap, making it easier for search engines like Bing or others to discover your content.
To edit your robots.txt file, go to Settings > Website, then scroll down to Search Engine Robots. Add the line at the bottom, exactly as I showed earlier.
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Alright, let’s recap!
We covered:
The difference between XML and visual sitemaps.
How to find your visual sitemap URL and XML sitemap URL.
How to add your sitemap to your robots.txt file.
How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
Now, let’s address some common questions:
Do you need to update your sitemap periodically?
No, you don’t! Google will regularly crawl your sitemap, and BigCommerce keeps all your links updated automatically.
Do you ever have to resubmit your sitemap?
No, once it’s submitted, it’s good forever—unless you move platforms.
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That’s all the questions I had. Hopefully, this video answered everything about sitemaps. If you have any more questions, feel free to leave a comment. Maybe your question will inspire my next video!
