Sitemaps are crucial to your Shopify site‘s search engine optimization. They help search engine crawlers find your eCommerce website’s URLs so they can understand and index your online store‘s content. When you submit your sitemap to search engines, it can help increase your search engine rankings for competitive target keywords that will grow your organic traffic.
In this guide, we explain why sitemaps are essential and how to find and submit your Shopify sitemap to Google and other search engines.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that helps search engines discover and index your website’s content. It can include URLs for pages, images, PDFs, videos, and other key website elements.
Beyond listing important pages, a sitemap also signals updates to search engines. It uses attributes like “changefreq” (indicating how often content changes) and “lastmod” (showing the most recent update) to improve crawling efficiency.
Where Is My Sitemap On Shopify?
Your sitemap is in the root directory of your primary domain. To find your store’s Sitemap, enter your store’s URL followed by a /sitemap.xml, like www.storewebsite.com/sitemap.xml. Some Shopify stores don’t have a custom domain, so it might be www.sitename.myshopify.com/sitemap.xml. This is your sitemap URL and will bring you to a screen showing your sitemap. You can see an example of a Shopify sitemap.xml file below.
How do I create a Sitemap For My Shopify store?
Because the Shopify sitemap is created automatically when you set up a store and add new pages, you do not need to “create” your own sitemap. Shopify takes care of this for you.
The Parts Of a Shopify Sitemap
As you can see in the above image, the main Shopify sitemap (parent sitemap) contains links to individual types of sitemaps (also called child sitemaps):
- Product Pages – (/sitemap_products_1.xml) Any product you sell on Shopify gets its own sitemap.
- Product Images – This sitemap has URLs to images of your products.
- Standard Pages – (/sitemap_pages_1.xml) This sitemap contains the standard pages you create in Shopify
- Product Collections – (/sitemap_collections_1.xml) A sitemap of your product category/collection pages
- Blog posts – (/sitemap_blogs_1.xml) Each blog post is collected in this sitemap
How a Sitemap Helps Your Shopify SEO
Sitemaps are blueprints and guides to your website’s pages. Google and Bing both use sitemaps to crawl your website. Without a sitemap, you’re asking Google to blindly find your website pages, and there’s no guarantee Google will index them so they show in the search results.
Whenever you create a new page or add a new product to your Shopify store, the sitemap is updated with the new URL. Sitemaps are particularly useful for eCommerce websites since they regularly change and update products depending on inventory.
Editing a Shopify Sitemap
You can’t edit a Shopify sitemap in the Shopify admin or in the theme code. Unlike WordPress plugins such as Yoast or RankMath, which allow you to pick and choose what pages and content are included in your XML sitemap, Shopify generates your sitemap automatically and does not allow users to make any edits.
No-Indexing Specific Pages
While pages are automatically added to a sitemap for search engines to find, there is a way to request that bots not index or crawl specific pages.
To do this, you can use the “noindex” command in the robot’s meta tag.
- Go to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit code > Layout > {/} theme.liquid template
- In the <head> section, add this code:
{% if handle contains ‘page you want to exclude’ %} <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”> {% endif %}
This code tells search engines to exclude a specific page from their index. When you exclude pages, they may not be removed from your sitemap, but they won’t be indexed by Google and therefore won’t show in the search results.
What About HTML Sitemaps?
There are Shopify apps that create what’s referred to as an HTML sitemap. HTML sitemaps are nothing more than a list of all the pages of your website, that you smack on a random page. An HTML sitemap should not be seen as a replacement for an XML sitemap, and we generally recommend against using them.
Verifying Your Website With Google Search Console
While Shopify creates and manages your sitemap, you still need to submit it to Google. To do this, you need your webmaster or site owner to set up a Google Search Console account. First, visit https://search.google.com/ and enter your email.
Next, you should see a screen with two options:
The first “Domain” option lets you set up a single Search Console account for multiple versions of your website. In the past, you had to have individual accounts for each subdomain, but not anymore. For instance, if you have a subdomain, such as store.mycoolstore.com, it’s recommended you use this option. Note that this option requires you to verify the website’s domain name through your DNS. This is a bit more complicated, but can be done if you’re familiar with DNS.
The “URL Prefix” option is what most users should choose. It allows you to add any single version of your website, like www.storewebsite.com. This is all most website owners need.
There are several options to verify you own the website, including uploading a file, adding a TXT record to your domain, or using your Google Analytics account.
For this guide, we’ll show you what option every Shopify store owner can use to verify their site.
- First, choose the HTML Tag verification option and copy the meta tag
- Next, navigate to your Shopify website and log in
- Choose “Online Store” on the left-hand sidebar.
- Click the “Action” dropdown and choose “Edit Code”
- Underneath the “Layout” title, you’ll see a list of files. Click the file called theme.liquid
You’re going to see a bunch of code. Don’t worry. The next steps are super easy.
- Find the <head> tag. It’s usually toward the top of the code
- Now, navigate just below the <head> tag and find several lines of code that each start with <meta>. There should be 4-5 of them ,depending on your theme structure. I’ve included a picture below of what this looks like
- Right below the last <meta> tag, paste the meta tag from Google Search Console you copied earlier
- Hit the “Save” button at the top
Just navigate back to Google Search Console and hit the “Verify” button to verify your website with Google Search Console. There’s only one last step to take to submit your sitemap to Google.
How to Add a Sitemap to Google Search Console
Now that you’re logged in to Search Console, you’ll see a lot of data, charts, and metrics. But the first step you need to take is adding your sitemap.
To do so, navigate to the left-hand side of the Search Console and click on “Sitemaps”. On the next screen, all you need to do is put sitemap.xml in the box, hit the “submit” button, and you’re good to go. Your new sitemap has been added to Google Search Console.
It usually takes Google a few days to process your sitemap completely. Once it does, you’ll be able to come back to the Search Console and see the pages it has processed from your sitemap.
Google Search Console is a must-have for any website owner or SEO. It not only helps Google understand your website but it allows you to see your organic search data even more than Google Analytics can. We recommend checking out the following resources for more information on how to use Google Search Console: here, here, and here.