How to Create a Sitemap for Your Website Using PowerPack Elementor Sitemap Widget?

Looking for a way to create a sitemap for your website using Elementor?

You might have heard of terms like XML Sitemaps while reading about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

An XML Sitemap, or simply, Sitemap, is a file that lists the content of your website in an XML format, so search engines like Google can easily index your content.

Similar to the robots.txt file of your website, a Sitemap also helps Google and other search engines easily crawl your website by giving them a map of your site’s content.

How Does a Website Sitemap Look Like?

A Sitemap usually contains some helpful metadata like:

• Raw URLs of the pages on your site.
• Information on when a particular page was last modified.
• Images on a particular URL of the site.

Below is a screenshot of what a Sitemap looks like for your reference.

Now that we know what Sitemaps are let us understand how they are beneficial for our website.

How does adding a Sitemap improve the SEO of your WordPress website?

Adding a Sitemap to your WordPress website will help the search engines crawl your website easily. Below mentioned are some of the other ways in which a sitemap improves the SEO of your WordPress website:

• Using Sitemaps, you can ask Google to crawl certain pages on priority by adding respective metadata to that pages.
• Although Google crawls your website even if you do not have a sitemap, having a Sitemap helps search engine bots crawl content faster than they would if you do not have a sitemap. This results in faster indexing of your site’s pages on Google.
• If you add your sitemap to Google Search Console, then you can use the console to find out how effective you’re at indexing your site’s pages with the help of analytics provided by the search console.
• According to Google Search Central, if your site uses many media files (videos, images), then Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate. This may include the image type, subject matter, image licensing details, etc.

These were some benefits of adding a Sitemap to your WordPress site. How can you determine if you need a Sitemap for your website?

Do you need a Sitemap?

Do I need a Sitemap for my website? – Many people ask this question, so let’s try to answer it as clearly as possible.

Cases in which having a Sitemap helps your website

1. When you’ve launched a new website with very few external links, then, in that case, having a sitemap is really beneficial. As quoted by Google Search Central, the reason behind this is that “Googlebot and other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them”.
2. Suppose your website has a large amount of media content. In that case, having a sitemap can be really beneficial because if Google or any other search engine needs additional information regarding any media items (images, videos), it can be fetched from the sitemaps.
3. If your site has a large number of pages, it can sometimes result in Google search crawlers overlooking some recently added or updated pages on the site. Having a Sitemap ensures that search engines crawl all the pages.
4. If your website has many pages that are not interlinked well, then it is possible that Google or other search crawlers might overlook them. In order to avoid such a situation, it is better to use a Sitemap.

Now that we have gone through the cases where having a sitemap helps let us also go through the other aspect where having a Sitemap is not that important.

Cases in which you might not need a Sitemap

1. The pages on your site are interlinked thoroughly in such a way that Google can easily get to other pages of your site by following the links on the homepage.
2. Your site does not contain any media files you want to be displayed in Google search results. As we know, Sitemaps can fetch information regarding media files in order to display them in search results, so if there are no media files to be displayed in search results, then there’s no need for a sitemap.

Till now, we have covered what an XML Sitemap is, the benefits of having a Sitemap on your website, and cases in which you might need/not need a Sitemap.

Now, suppose that you have already added a Sitemap to your site and then understood that you might not need a Sitemap. So, a natural question that arises here is, does a Sitemap have any negative effect on your site? We’ll try to answer this question in the next section!

Does a Sitemap have any negative effect on your site?

No! Having a Sitemap will never have any negative effect on your site. The worst thing that can happen is that you won’t see any positive results after adding a sitemap. As quoted by Google, “in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one.”

Now that we know about XML Sitemaps in detail let’s see how we can create one for our Elementor site using the PowerPack Elementor Sitemap widget.

Create a Sitemap using PowerPack Elementor Sitemap Widget

We have also created a short, to-the-point video that explains in detail how you can create a Sitemap using PowerPack Elementor’s Sitemap widget.

So, if you like the video explanation, I suggest you look at it.

Now, let’s continue. To create the Sitemap, we will be using these two plugins:

• Elementor Free Version: Get Elementor.
• PowerPack for Elementor: Get PowerPack.

Once you’ve installed and activated these plugins, you would have to create a new page by heading over to your WordPress Dashboard > Pages > Add New. Name the page “Sitemap.”

Next, click on “Edit with Elementor” to open the page in Elementor Page Builder.

Launch Elementor Editor

As soon as you click on “Edit with Elementor,” the Elementor editor will open up. Next, drag and drop the Sitemap widget in the Elementor editor.

As soon as you add the Sitemap widget, you’ll see the list of pages in a column, and the list of categories on your site appears in another column with default settings.

The below screenshot shows how your page would look after adding the Sitemap widget.

Now that we have added the PowerPack Sitemap widget to the page, we will customize and style the Elementor editor’s content and style tab.

Sitemap Widget Customization in Content Tab

As we can see in the screenshot above, the Sitemap widget’s content tab allows us to display the links on our site as per our requirements.

First, we can choose the Type of Sitemap we want to display on our site. We can choose between “Post Type” and “Taxonomy.” For our example, we’ve chosen the “Post Type.”

Next, we have to choose the Source of Taxonomy. Since I wanted to show all my products on the Sitemap, I have chosen Source as “Products.” You can choose any source from the list.

The next option is “Exclude Products.” It allows you to exclude any product from the sitemap. Going further, you can change the Title of the taxonomy section. The default title was “Pages.” However, we have changed it to “Products,” as shown in the screenshot above.

Finally, you can order the Taxonomy in Ascending or Descending order. You can order the Taxonomy by Date, Title, Menu Order, or Random by using the “Order By” option of the Sitemap widget.

Another option in the Content tab is “Hierarchical View.” To see how this functions, we’ve added another item in our Sitemap named “Product Categories.”

As you can see in the below screenshot, we’ve chosen “Type” as “Taxonomy” and “Source” as “Product Categories.” We have also enabled the Hierarchical View, as shown in the screenshot below.

Here, “Product Categories” have a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, so you can use this option to display the categories in Hierarchical order. You can also choose the depth of the hierarchy you want to display in your Sitemap.

Some other options in the Content tab of the PowerPack Elementor Content tab are:

• Columns: You can display your sitemap in any columns you wish. In our example, we chose column “4” (as shown in the above screenshot). However, we only have two items to display (Products and Product Categories), so our sitemap is spread across two columns.
• Title HTML Tag: Here, you can choose the heading tag for the title of the items in your sitemap. We’ve chosen this as H2.
• Add Nofollow: If you enable this option, the links in your sitemap will have a “nofollow” tag. The “nofollow” tag tells the Search Engines to ignore the links and not let them affect the search engine rankings.
• Open in a New Window: As the name suggests, if you enable this, all the links in your sitemap will open in a new window.

As we go down in the Content tab, another section is “Tree Structure.” Tree Structure has the option to enable or disable the “Tree Layout.”

A thing to note here is Hierarchical View option must be enabled for Post Type or Taxonomy for Tree Layout to work.

As you can see in the screenshot above, once we enabled the Tree Structure, the “Product Categories” sitemap turned into a tree and branch-like structure.

If we click on the “+” icon in the Product Categories, the subcategories of the parent category will open up. Look at the screenshot below to understand how the branching of subcategories is done once the Tree Structure option is enabled.

This was all about the Content tab of the PowerPack Elementor’s Sitemap widget. Now, let’s head over to the Style tab and style our Sitemap widget.

Sitemap Widget Styling in the Style Tab

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Sitemap widget consists of 3 sections in the style tab:

• List
• Title
• List Items

Let us go through each of the sections one by one.

List: As the name suggests, we can style the page’s overall list of the Sitemaps using this option. We can change the indent of the list, add a background color to the list, apply border properties, and add padding to the list. As you can see in the screenshot below, we have applied an indent of 10 to our list.

Title: This is the next option in the Style tab. We can use this option to style the title of the Sitemap items. Through this option, we can change the alignment, background color, and text color, apply border properties, add margins and padding to the titles, and change the typography of the Title.

The above screenshot shows the styling that we have applied to the title. We chose the left alignment and applied a background and text color to the title. We have added margin and padding to the title and changed the default typography.

List Items: As the name suggests, this option can be used to style the list items in the sitemap. We can change the items’ background color, text, and hover color and typography and apply padding to the list of items in the sitemap.

Look at the screenshot below to see our sitemap after applying the styling changes.

This was about the Style tab of the Elementor Editor for PowerPack Elementor’s Sitemap widget.

Wrapping it Up!

In the above steps, we have customized and styled our Sitemap page to have a stylish look and elegant feel. To achieve this look, we have used a combination of customizations such as Hierarchical view and Tree view and styling options such as typography, background colors, and hover colors.

You can check the options that we used in the above screenshots.

Check out our Sitemap page build with PowerPack Elementor Sitemap Widget below!

I am sure, with the help of this tutorial, you would have been able to set up the Sitemap page of your website easily.

You can do a lot more with the PowerPack Addons for Elementor. There are more than 70 creative widgets that you can use to customize your Elementor pages. If you wish to learn more about the PowerPack Addons for Elementor, check here.

What are your thoughts on this tutorial? Do share if you found this guide useful!