A sitemap for a nine page website: pointless or not
A nine page site usually does not need one, and Google says so. You can skip a sitemap if the site is small, meaning about 500 pages or fewer, and comprehensively linked internally so that a crawler can reach every important page from the home page. Failing the second condition is the real problem, and a sitemap only hides it.
The two conditions, and which one people fail
Google's guidance is unusually plain. A sitemap may be unnecessary when the site is small, defined as about 500 pages or fewer, and when it is comprehensively linked internally, meaning a crawler can find every important page by following links from the home page.
Almost every small business passes the first condition and quietly fails the second. The service page reachable only from a newsletter, the location page linked from nowhere, the old offer that lives on as a bookmark: those are the pages a sitemap papers over. Adding the file does not make them findable by a person, and a page no person can reach was never worth indexing.
The specification, and what it means for you
The limits are generous enough to be irrelevant at this size. One sitemap file may contain at most 50,000 URLs and must not exceed 50 MB uncompressed. A sitemap index may list at most 50,000 sitemaps under the same size limit. A nine page site uses 0.018 percent of the first limit.
The required tags are three: urlset, url and loc, with each loc under 2,048 characters. Everything else is optional. lastmod is worth writing honestly, while changefreq and priority are hints, and priority defaults to 0.5 when omitted.
That is why priority values are the most pointless field in most sitemaps. Setting every page to 1.0 says the same thing as setting none of them: the numbers are relative within your own site and carry no promise.
| Item | Value | Required |
|---|---|---|
| URLs per sitemap file | 50,000 maximum | Limit |
| Uncompressed file size | 50 MB maximum | Limit |
| urlset, url, loc | Structural tags | Yes |
| loc length | Under 2,048 characters | Yes |
| lastmod, changefreq, priority | Hints, priority defaults to 0.5 | No |
What to do instead of arguing about it
Walk your own site from the home page and write down every page you can reach in three clicks. If a page you care about is missing from that list, fix the navigation, not the sitemap.
Then write the sitemap anyway, because it costs nothing and it gives you a single list to check against. Just do not treat its existence as evidence that your structure is sound.
The list is worth having for a second reason. Once a month, fetch every URL in it and record the status code. That takes a minute and it catches the two failures nobody notices from outside: a page that started redirecting, and a page that quietly began returning an error while still sitting in your navigation.
Questions and answers
How small is small?
Does a sitemap get pages indexed?
Should I set priority values?
What is the file size limit?
Sources
- Google Search Central, Sitemaps overview The 500 page threshold and the internal linking condition
- sitemaps.org, protocol specification URL and size limits, required and optional tags, priority default
