Magento 1, Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce): The Development Journey
Magento 2 XML sitemap extensions are transforming the way eCommerce webpages get visible to target audiences across various search engines. Magento 2 is the latest and most advanced eCommerce platform that brings a range of innovative features to empower businesses to create engaging online stores and simplify their website management. Magento 2 comes with one of the most interesting features: the ability to create custom landing pages that can be used further to promote and market specific products, services, or campaigns.
Magento, formally known as Adobe Commerce, is a widely popular and recognized eCommerce development platform for online businesses. Initially, it was introduced as Magento 1, which later on, after a decade, got the recently updated version that we know as Magento 2. In 2020, Adobe discontinued support, updates, and error fixes for Magento 1. Though Magento 1 used to be a flexible eCommerce platform, it used to lack some critical features and limitations for innovation, resulting in sluggish speed, page upload issues, and other performance concerns. Then, Adobe introduced Magento 2, developed with additional features and benefits that enhanced the platform’s capabilities and freedom to innovate for a better user experience and resolved the above concerns.
Adobe’s Magento 2 is a PHP-based content management system designed to give a range of innovative and engaging characteristics, features, benefits, and more for an advanced experience with your eCommerce store. It is flexible and scalable to set up various product properties and ease the management of online stores with different regions, languages, domains, and product ranges. Magento 2 platform has the capability to efficiently work with different tax rates at the regional, country, or postal code level based on the various types of sales, offers, and products. It also has the feature to give insights into various performance metrics, including shopping carts, marked goods, reviews, tags, searches, sales figures, sales volume, etc. Additionally, it provides support for multiple payment and delivery methods. Magento 2 works beyond developing an eCommerce website; it helps owners get the most from their business site. With the help of sitemaps, businesses can get all their relevant and priority pages listed with Google Search Console to get enhanced content visibility and engagement.
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What is Magento XML Sitemap?
“An XML (Extensible Markup Language) sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of a website. It helps search engines like Google find and index the content.”
Magento XML sitemap is like any other XML sitemap, a file containing links to all pages of a website or an eCommerce website. The site owner or developer submits this file to Google Search Console (formally webmasters) to make the search bots crawl and index your website or eStore pages correspondently ranked in Google to make it available for the respective target audience. In the Magento XML sitemap, all the products, categories, and CMS pages are included to enable search engines to find and crawl the website’s contents, including products, videos, images, and news content, even for content without any internal links. Plus, as a site owner, we can define how often robots should crawl these pages for better visibility and engagement. However, as the Magento XML sitemap adds your pages to the crawling queue in the list, it is difficult to know when Google will actually crawl your pages.
Importance of XML Sitemaps
With the basic definition, we understand that XMP sitemaps are essential for enhancing the visibility and engagement of website pages. Here, we discuss the importance of XML sitemaps in detail.
Improves Indexing
- The XML sitemaps make sure that search engines search and discover all important pages of a website or an eCommerce store
- It is essentially beneficial for a large website that contains a huge number of pages or comparatively complex navigation, as it ensures no content is overlooked
- It works for pages that have been ignored or buried deep within the website's structure or are not properly linked with other pages
- The sitemap's "Timestamps" informs search engines of the recent modification date of a page to ensure that every time the new or recently updated content gets quickly indexed
- It helps to keep the relevance and freshness of the website's indexed content for better engagement
Frequency and Priority
- With XML sitemaps, site owners can assign individual priority levels for each page that ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 (where 1.0 is the top/highest priority)
- It prioritizes the pages within a website and enables search engines to guide which pages should be crawled more often than others
- It gives valuable insights for search engines to place their resources, however, doesn’t assure higher rankings or crawling frequency
Saves Time
- XML sitemaps may include the <changefreq> tag to show how often a page is likely to get changed (daily, weekly, and monthly) and saves time for manual tagging
- It also helps search engines in optimizing crawling schedules and make sure that no resource gets wasted while repeated visits to pages that don’t change frequently
Supports Multimedia and News
- XML sitemaps showcase detailed information about multimedia content like images, audio, and videos and index them to enhance visibility
- With special tags, it can highlight news content for search engines
- It gives quicker indexing for numerous content pages
- Enables rapid indexing for enhanced visibility and higher traffic for time-sensitive information like news content, discount offers, and viral content
Error Detection
- XML sitemaps help find and fix issues for regular monitoring and updates, including broken links or incorrect URLs
- It ensures that resources are not getting wasted by search engines on faulty links to maintain the site’s health
- It helps to build a well-structured site for easier search engine indexing and user navigation
How to Configure Magento 2 XML Sitemap?
Magento 2 XML sitemap offers incredible advantages to site owners and developers. If you start from scratch, Magento sitemap configuration is an easier two-step process. The first step is to configure the basic settings (including frequency, priority of indexing, etc.) and then move to the actual process of creating a sitemap file. Let’s understand the configuration of Magento 2 XML sitemap here with the basics.
Here are the steps to configure XML sitemap in Magento 2.
Step 1. First, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap and go through the XML sitemap options.
Step 2. Next, in General Settings Select "Yes" to enable Google XML sitemap generation
Step 3. After that, write a path in the Path field to define where it will be located.
Step 4. Then, Select frequency to generate XML sitemap. You can select either daily, weekly, or monthly from given options.
Step 5. Next, Select time to generate XML sitemap automatically.
Step 6. After that, click to generate XML sitemap manually to create your XML sitemap.
Step 5. Then, it will automatically add the xml sitemap in your Magento 2 store.
Once you’ve finished the above steps, you can see the generated sitemap.
Sitemap Generation
Magento 2 ‘Sitemap Generation’ is a simple process that can be easily done with the help of Magento 2’s built-in functionality. Magento 2 comes with built-in functionality to generate an XML sitemap that can be easily customized to match the needs of the website or eCommerce store. XML sitemaps are easily configurable to include or exclude specific pages, and settings are customizable for website requirements. Additionally, one can use Magento 2 XML sitemap extensions that help to generate SEO-optimized XML and HTML Sitemaps for your store to improve crawling and indexing in the search engine. It helps to enhance the site navigation and user experience (UX).
After successfully setting up the sitemap settings, you can move to generate your XML sitemap file by following these steps.
- First, navigate to MageDelight > Sitemap > XML Sitemap and press the ‘Add New XML Sitemap’ button.
- After that, set the XML file name of your choice in the ‘Filename’ field and then enter the ‘Path’ where you wish it to be located and press the ‘Save XML Sitemap’ button.
- After that, click to generate XML sitemap manually to create your XML sitemap.
How to Automate Magento Sitemap Generation?
In this guide, we have already configured the auto-generation settings for the sitemap to ease the job. If you have the top Magento 2 SML sitemap extensions, like the Magento 2 Google Sitemap Extension by MageDelight, they help to automatically generate XML sitemaps for your Magento 2 store.
After you complete the ‘Generation Settings’ in the Stores > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap section, you can submit the XML file to the Google Search Console. The ‘Search robots’ will then retrieve all the data from there.
How to Exclude Some Pages From XML Sitemap?
Magento gives the freedom to manage the XML sitemap seamlessly with ease, yet it doesn’t have the option to disable pages from the sitemap. It’s helpful when your analysis requires dropping some pages from the search results or strategically needs to remove one or more pages. Here, any of these Magento 2 XML sitemap extensions come to your rescue and enable the removal of pages from the Magento sitemap.
The Magento 2 XML sitemap is essential for website and eCommerce store owners who wish to get more engaging organic traffic from search engines. Magento 2 XML sitemap extensions are one way to improve the indexing and visibility of relevant pages. The default Magento feature can do the magic; it helps generate an XML sitemap.
Additionally, you need to think beyond indexing to improve SEO, enhance visibility, and better engagement. Use canonical tags, hreflangs, Meta tags templates, Meta robots, and other SEO-related features to emphasize the visibility of your product pages and other site search visibility.
Final Words
In the Magento 2 store, the XML sitemap is the configuration that produces a file with categorized links to all necessary online store pages in XML format. With the help of these Magento 2 XML sitemap configuration steps, you can enhance the visibility of your website or eCommerce store and gain better engagement with your audience. The search bots can now help you navigate your site pages for better visibility, higher ranking, and increased engagement, which will result in more customers and higher revenue. Adobe has done a great job when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities with the Magento 2 platform, which helps businesses grow and thrive. It can be used with third-party extensions like Magento 2 Google Sitemap Extension by MageDelight to get enhanced visibility across search engines. For more details, get in touch with an eCommerce expert from MageDelight and explore the benefits of the latest Sitemap extensions.