Lightweight Sitemap Generator

Lightweight Sitemap Generator is a minimal WordPress plugin that creates a valid XML sitemap for search engines (Google, Yandex and others), fully compliant with sitemaps.org.

Main features:

• Generates a valid sitemap.xml (or wp-sitemap.xml) with proper <loc> and <lastmod> tags (ISO-8601 UTC format)
• Unified structure for posts, pages, products, built-in taxonomies, and detected public third-party taxonomies
• Global chronological order (newer → older)
• Automatic duplicate prevention across all sources
• Two modes:
  • File mode — creates a static sitemap in the site root (minimal server load)
  • Dynamic mode — builds sitemap on-the-fly (always up to date, cached with TTL)
• Clean and minimal settings page in WP Admin:
  • Enable or disable posts, pages, categories, tags, authors, archives
  • Supports WooCommerce products, DW Q&A, and all detected custom post types/taxonomies
• Homepage is always included automatically
• Flexible <lastmod> for homepage:
  • Smart — based on the most recently updated content
  • Conservative — static front-page date
  • Fast — current time on each generation
• Optional sitemap splitting (up to 50 000 URLs per part) with automatic sitemap index
• Google News: Optional separate news-sitemap.xml for Google News with 48-hour news window and 1,000 URLs per file
• Two independent generation engines — optimized for both regular and ultra-large sites
• Safe caching with TTL and diagnostic comments (HIT / MISS / timing)
• HTTP header support:
  • Sends correct Content-Type, Last-Modified, Cache-Control, and ETag headers
  • Optional X-Robots-Tag: noindex, follow header for sitemap requests
• Security and reliability:
  • Capability checks and nonce validation
  • Strict sanitization and option whitelisting
  • File operations via WP_Filesystem (with safe fallback)
  • No external requests

Credits

Created by Andrey Berestov