Generated sitemaps that auto-updates
Hi there,
I hope you are going well. Recently, I've been interested in building a tool to solve a particular problem:
When you build a custom website (I mean without any CMS, such as WordPress, Wix, Drupal, Joomla, …), it's always cumbersome to create and maintain a sitemap. You have to build an XML file with all the pages of your site and update it each time you add a new page. That's very painful, and you easily forget it.
Am I the only one who already experienced that problem?
If not, what did you find as a solution to solve it?
Would you have paid for a SAAS solution that would have solved it for you?
If yes, feel free to leave me your email if you are interested in testing our product for free once it will go into a public beta phase, that would help us a lot.
Best,
This problem exists but don't have big addressable market.
That's because CMS , custom packages makes this problem almost non-existent.
With that said, I doubt if someone will pay you for generating sitemap.xml.
May be people would pay you for creating interactive SiteMap page instead.
Wow. Did not expect that much feedback. Thanks you all for the comments. Looks like it's not something people would pay for. Even if the problem exists, there are already plenty of solutions, and dev will probably use a library, even if it takes a bit of configuration, than buying a product.
It helps me a lot! Will probably do another thing
For my websites, I just make a sitemap.php file (that auto-grabs metadata about all the pages from the database and returns it in real time each time the page is fetched) and rewrite it to sitemap.xml
Had the same issue recently for dynamic pages for Next.js, but found in the end a package that does the job.
Obviously as a developper i would try to find a package myself to solve the problem (or develop as a solution), and i would be interested in knowing how you can solve this issue while being framework-agnostic and language-agnostic ( a solution that would work for react or PHP, but also in React would work for Next or Gatsby)
Also i think you should know which is your audience : developers would be hard to sell to, but regular folks would us a CMS which normally comes with a plugin for sitemaps ( like yoast for wordpress or whatever)
+1 – I use next-sitemap both at work and for my SaaS Adflow.
It's flexible enough that it helps me generate a sitemap that covers most of my use cases, and when it doesn't I just rewrite a custom API endpoint (similar to the approach described by @nathanio)
That is the package i found in the end and the approach i used :) Too bad it doesn't offer compressing sitemap files out of the box.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
What package did you use for NextJs? I haven't researched yet so this will save me some time.
Can't speak for @reda85, but quoting my previous comment "I use next-sitemap both at work and for my SaaS Adflow. " 😃
Check it out it is actually fairly easy to set-up, and works well with the latest NextJs 10.1.
Thanks. That helps a lot.
That's a good reason to use some CMS or framework that can have such readymade components
I am pretty sure you can find a sitemap generator for a static file site if that's what your using (and than put it into a pipeline step)
I'm encountering an issue with my WordPress website. The Sitemap of moveinpak, generated by Rank Math, isn't loading properly. Whenever I try to access it by adding ".xml" to the URL, it redirects me to a 404 error page. What could be the solution to this problem? Thank you.
wordpress has some decent sitemap plugins. even jetpack has one now.
I just re-routed /sitemap.xml to a PHP page that parses all the avail pages programatically. But if there was a super cheap SaaS solution for this, probably I wouldn't have bothered.
Similar to the comment in relation to Next.js, I work with Ruby on Rails and there is a sitemap generator gem that handles most of the heavy lifting on this. You can pass in routes to blog articles etc. and it outputs a valid xml file, pings Google and Bing.
I'm not sure how many custom websites are built without an underlying CMS or framework that could automate 95% of the production of the sitemap. The tiny bit I have to do manually is copy URLs from my helpdesk software to the generator but even that could be automated using HelpScout's API if I was inclined.