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Back in early 2000s, government websites used to have a link on their main pages, titled “Sitemap”. This page usually contained a list of all the pages on that website. Even today some websites have such HTML sitemaps. However, sitemaps have evolved so much from the manually created HTML bulleted list. Today sitemaps are published in XML instead of HTML and their target audience is search engines and not people. Recently one of our users sent us an email asking us: what is a WordPress sitemap? Do I need to have a sitemap on my site? How can I create a sitemap in WordPress? If you are new to WordPress and had the same questions, then you are at the right place. In this article we will explain what is a sitemap, why you need a sitemap, how to create a sitemap in WordPress, and how to tell search engines about your sitemaps.

What is a WordPress XML Sitemap?

Sitemap is a list of pages on a website that is accessible to all users. An XML sitemap is a way for website owners to tell search engines about all the pages that exist on their website. WordPress XML sitemap also tells search engines which links on your website are more important than others and how frequently you update your website. While sitemaps do not boost your search rankings, it allows search engines to better crawl your website.

Why You Need an XML Sitemap

From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) point of view sitemaps are extremely important. First we would like to clearly state that adding a sitemap does not affect search rankings. However, if there is some page on your site that is not indexed, then sitemap provide you a way to let search engines know about that page, so it can be indexed properly.

Sitemaps are very useful for new websites and blogs. As most new blogs usually don’t get many backlinks to their individual posts, it becomes harder for search engines to discover all of their posts and pages. Sitemaps allow those websites to help search engines crawl their sites more efficiently.

For popular websites, sitemaps allow your website to interact with search engines more effectively. Search engines can guess how often your site is updated, which parts of your website are more frequently updated than others, set crawl rate for your site, etc. This improves the overall visibility of your site to search engines.

How to create a Sitemap in WordPress?

There are several ways to create an XML sitemap in WordPress. At WPBeginner, we use Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin to generate our sitemaps. We use this plugin because it allows us to optimize our blog posts along with offering other features such as sitemaps, social integration, and more. We have also noticed that it works more efficnelty than other standalone sitemap generators for WordPress. Lastly, it also offers custom sitemaps like the Video Sitemap.

To add a sitemap to your WordPress site, first thing you need to do is install and activate WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. By default, WordPress SEO does not enable XML sitemap functionality, so you will have to turn it on. To do that go to SEO » XML Sitemaps and check the box to enable XML sitemap functionality.



When you check the box to enable XML sitemap functionality, WordPress SEO will show you a number of options that you can configure for your Sitemaps. If you are unsure about what to do with them, then ignore them and click on Save settings.

Now your sitemaps are generated and publicly accessible. WordPress SEO will show a XML Sitemap button which you can click to view your sitemap_index.xml sitemap.

How to Tell Search Engines About Sitemaps?

Search engines are quite smart in finding a sitemap. Whenever you publish new content a ping is sent to Google and Bing to inform them about changes in your sitemap. However, we recommend that you submit your sitemap to Google by using Google Webmaster tools. The benefit of this is that Google will now show you any errors, pages indexed, and other relevant stats that will be helpful to you as a webmaster.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools. If you are not already signed in to your Google account, then you will be asked to sign in. After signing in you will reach webmaster tools. There you will see “Add a site” button, click it and then add the URL of your website.

On the next screen you will be asked to verify the ownership of the website you are trying to add. There are several methods to do that. But since you are already using WordPress SEO plugin, then the easiest method for you is to copy the HTML Meta tag value and paste it in WordPress SEO plugin. To do that click on Alternate methods and then on HTML Tag. You will then see a line of HTML Meta tag code.



Copy and paste this line in a text editor like notepad. Now copy the value in the content=”" (Without copying the commas). Leave the webmaster tools site verification page open because we will come back to the page after adding the meta tag to verify the ownership of the website. Go to your WordPress admin area and then click on SEO tab. This will take you to WordPress SEO plugin’s dashboard. Scroll down, and you will see Webmaster Tools heading. Paste the meta tag value you copied next to Google Webmaster tools and Save Settings.


Go back to Google webmaster tools, site verification screen and press the verify button. You will see a notice like “Congratulations you have successfully verified your ownership of www.yoursite.com”. Click continue to see webmaster tools dashboard for your site.

On the next screen you will see Sitemaps column with no sitemaps in it. Clicking on it will take you to a Sitemaps page where you can add your sitemaps. Click on the red button labeled “Add/Test Sitemap” and provide the URL of your sitemap.

Yoasts WordPress SEO plugin publishes multiple sitemaps for your WordPress site. The main sitemap is sitemap_index.xml which contains link to your other sitemaps. You can either submit sitemap_index.xml alone or submit all other sitemaps one by one. We recommend submitting sitemap_index.xml alone, Google will then automatically discover other sitemaps and crawl them.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It will take Google sometime to crawl your website. After a while you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.


Visit Google Webmaster tools often, at least once a month. As your site gets older you will start seeing more and more useful data about your website and how it is seen by the search engine. This information can help you learn how well your site is doing and what other things you can do to improve its performance in search engines.

We hope that it answered all the related questions like what is an XML sitemap, what are the benefits of a sitemap, how to create a sitemap in WordPress. Feel free to leave a comment below!

As a WordPress publisher you must have come across RSS Feeds. Each WordPress website automatically publishes RSS feeds for content and comments. Did you ever wonder what is RSS and how you can use RSS in WordPress? In this article we will explain what is RSS feeds, what are the benefits of RSS, how to use RSS feeds, and how to take your WordPress RSS feeds to the next level.

What is RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary however it is often referred to as the feed or news feed. In the early days, if you wanted to keep track of updates on your favorite website, then you had to bookmark it in your browser and manually visit it frequently to see if there were any updates. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could tell your favorite websites to let you know every time they update? Well, this is exactly what RSS does. RSS allows users to keep track of their favorite websites without having to manually visit the website each time.

RSS allowed publishers to automatically syndicate their content, so that people can read it in their mailboxes, feed reader and/or other devices. RSS is basically an structured XML document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata such as published date, author name, etc. RSS feeds can be read by using programs called “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator” which can be web-based, desktop-based, and even mobile-based.

Many Web Content Management Systems such as WordPress has built in support for RSS feeds. By default each web page you publish using WordPress contains a meta tag that points to your website’s RSS feed location. You can disable RSS feeds in WordPress, but continue reading and you might change your mind about disabling them.

What are Benefits of RSS

RSS makes it easier for other people to subscribe to your content. Using an RSS feed, they can receive updates from your blog or website directly in their web browsers (except Google Chrome), feed readers, desktop applications, and many other devices and services. Subscribers don’t have to remember your website URL because they can bring the content into a central location where they like to read all of their websites at once. Your content becomes portable and your subscribers can even take it with them for offline reading.

RSS feeds also help build and nurture a loyal following around your website and content. RSS subscribers are more likely to share your content around their social circles and spread the word about your website. A lot of our readers automatically tweet every new WPBeginner article that come out using RSS feed and IFTTT.

By using RSS feeds, you can subscribe to your favorite websites and read them all at one place in your feed reader. As a content publisher, it helps you quickly scan through your favorite news and blog sites. It also enables you to sort your reading lists into categories and groups. By using RSS efficiently, you can really maximize your reading time.

How to Use RSS Feeds

You can subscribe to RSS feeds using a feed reader. We recommend using Feedly, It is available as a browser add-on as well as mobile app for iOS, Android, and Kindle devices. By using Feedly, you can sync your RSS subscriptions across your devices and resume reading wherever you left it.

Adding your favorite websites to Feedly is really simple, just enter the url of the website and click the add button to subscribe.

In most feed readers you can search for topics that interest you and subscribe to popular sources on those topics. You can also categorize your favorite sites into topics. Feed readers such as Feedly come with features to print, share, and email articles that you find interesting.

How to Promote your RSS Feed

As a WordPress user your website already publishes an RSS feed. You can encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed by adding an RSS icon to your sidebar or another prominent location. Here is how we do it on WPBeginner:


Burn your RSS feeds using a feed burning service like Feedburner or Feedblitz to get additional statistics regarding your feeds. We have a step by step guide to setup Feedburner for WordPress. Feedburner also offers email subscription box which you can add to your blog’s sidebar. But since there is a little bit uncertainity about the future of Feedburner, you might want to consider using other options to create daily or weekly newsletter in WordPress. Besides FeedBurner email subscription options are not very robust which is why we recommend using either Aweber or MailChimp.

Take your WordPress RSS Feeds to Next level

WordPress automatically generates your RSS feeds, but this does not mean that you don’t have control over them. You change certain things in your RSS feeds to make them more useful for yourself and your subscribers. You can add content and completely manipulate your WordPress RSS feeds. You can add post thumbnail to RSS feeds, or use separate RSS Feeds for categories and custom post types in your templates.

Add an Outside RSS Feed to your WordPress Blog

1. Open a browser window on your computer. Go to the site that you want to feed into your WordPress blog. For example, if you want to have a Tumblr feed on your WordPress blog, you would sign into your Tumblr account.

2. Copy the URL address on your site's homepage.
3. Add "/rss/" to the end of the copied URL address. This is your RSS address. For example, if your Tumblr blog were called "Computer tutorials" your RSS address might be "http://computertutorialsexample.tumblr.com/rss/"
4. Open another tab on your Internet browser window. Sign into your WordPress blog account. If you do not have a WordPress blog, go to the WordPress home page and click on the orange button that says "Get Started Here." It will take you through the sign up process.

5. Click on "My Account" or "Me" on the left side of the tool bar at the top of the page.
6. Scroll down your WordPress dashboard. Your dashboard is the vertical list on the left side of the page.
7. Find the "Appearance" Tab. There should be a number of options underneath "Appearance." If you do not see other options, click on the arrow on the Appearance tab.
8. Click on "Widgets" in the Appearance menu.
9. Find the "RSS" WordPress widget from the list in the top section or in the list of inactive widgets near the bottom.
10. Click and slowly drag the RSS box to the "Sidebar" box on the upper right hand side of the page. If you do not drag it slowly, your browser may not scroll up to the top right section of your browser page.

11. Paste your RSS feed address in the new RSS box that says "Enter the RSS feed URL here." Enter a title for your Tumblr feed. Specify how many posts you want to show, if you want to display content, the author or a link. Click the "Save" button.

12. Go to your blog to view your new WordPress RSS feed.

Create a RSS link to your WordPress Blog

1. Click on "Widgets" again in the appearance menu.
2. Find the "RSS Links" WordPress widget from the list of widgets.
3. Click and drag the RSS Links box to the Sidebar box on the upper right hand side of the page.
4. Title your RSS Feed.
5. Choose if you want to display posts, comments or posts and comments in your RSS feed.
6. Select the format for your RSS. It can be text link, image link or a text and image link.
7. Click the Save button and return to your blog to see your RSS feed. With this feature, subscribers can keep up to date on what you are doing and choose the posts they would like to read.

Use RSS Feeds When You Use WordPress As a CMS

We all like to be kept up-to-date on our favorite WordPress sites. The best way to do so is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Unless you’re using a plugin such as Feedsmith which redirects all your feeds to your Feedburner feed, you have a lot of options to subscribe to. You have the general site feed, of course, but also the comments feed and the category feeds. But.. what you don’t have is a feed for pages should you as a company decide to only use WordPress with static pages and not with a blog.

Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need.

The two solutions, in the shape of plugins, I have used for this on a couple of recent projects I did are the following are the following:

RSS Includes Pages

This plugin modifies your RSS feeds so that they include pages and not just posts. Including pages in your feed is particularly useful if you’re using WordPress as a CMS where pages represent a good portion of your content.

Find out more at the plugin’s page.

Page Feeder

Page Feeder lets you easily create and customise an RSS feed for your pages. Customize your feed using the settings page or via URL parameters. This plugin is great for those who use WordPress as a CMS solution and is my personal favorite.

Find out more at the plugin’s page.

So there you have two solid solutions on using your WordPress as a static page only CMS. How many times have you used WordPress with static pages only?

We hope that this article helped you understand what is RSS feed and how to use RSS in WordPress.

Have you ever worked on a WordPress site that has a lot of custom post types? Well as-is WordPress search is a disaster which is why many bloggers use Google custom search. Well, we were working on a site that has a good amount of resource articles, videos, books, and blog posts.

Using the default WordPress search just wasn’t cutting it. Using Google Search also was not a viable option. Therefore, we decided to create an advanced search form which lets user pick which area of the site they want to search by limiting custom post types via checkboxes.

Users can combine their search queries and most importantly, we made it so the checkboxes are saved along with the search query. This lets the user sees exactly what they searched for, and they can modify the parameters. In this article, we will show you how to create an advanced search form in WordPress utilizing the power of the WordPress search query and limiting the results by custom post types.

First thing you need to do is open your searchform.php file or wherever your search form is stored.
Then add the following fields inside the form code:

Don’t forget to replace the value with your custom post types. The code above basically limits your search results to those post types. Well, if you noticed we pretty much added all post types available except for pages. Well, there is a good reason for doing so which we will get to later. So make sure to include ALL post types that you want to search for using the main search button. These fields are hidden, so the user doesn’t see these.

Next open your search.php file and paste the following codes above your loop content, so your users can see the options at the top.

This will add a search box above your results with the search query inside the input box. This will also check which post types are being searched for in the query, and make the appropriate checkboxes checked. Remember, how we added all post types in the hidden field. Well, we added it just so we can run the in_array check and keep the checkboxes checked. There was no documentation on how to do this otherwise, so this was the best way we found that does the job. Below is a preview of how the search box looks:

From there, the user can simply modify the parameter as they please.

Hopefully this article helped those in need.
 

Have you ever tried to change your WordPress username just to find out that it cannot be changed? If you are, well then this article is for you. In this article, we will share a step by step guide on how to change the WordPress username on a cPanel Web Host using phpMyAdmin.

Note: To all users if this sounds scary, don’t worry. We will guide you step by step, so you don’t get lost.

Update: The easiest way to do this is create a new user account in WordPress (give it admin access). Then login with that username and delete your old account.


First thing you need to do is login to your cPanel. Scroll down to the databases section and click on phpMyAdmin.

Next you need to select the database that your blog is hosted in.

Click on the table wp_users on the left hand side. Then click edit on the username that you want to edit.

Change the user_login value to whatever you want. For example you can replace ‘admin’ to ‘bob’


Hit the Go button and you are done.
Go back to your site and login with your new username.

We hope that this article helped you to change your WordPress username. Feel free to leave a comment below!

Choosing between WordPress and Blogger is a tough decision that new bloggers must make. Most blogging experts and experienced users choose WordPress as the better blogging platform due to its robust features and flexibility. If you are interested in taking your BlogSpot blog to the next level by using WordPress, then you have come to the right place. In this article, we will show you how to move your blogger BlogSpot blog to self-hosted WordPress. Switch from Blogger to WordPress without losing Google rankings (maintain your old URLs, search traffic, Google Pagerank, and RSS Subscribers).

The Ultimate Objective:

You are currently blogging with the domain (xyz.blogspot.com) which is hosted at Blogger but you are now interested in converting your Blogging Platform from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress with a custom top level domain name.

The Difficulties (Moving From Blogger To WordPress):

Although with the help of an online tool we can easily import our old published articles and comments from Blogger to WordPress, there are still some bigger problems which require our attention.

• Few of your published articles on a Blogger BlogSpot blog could be ranked surprisingly high in the Search engines for a specific keyword, but when you move these articles to a new web address the chances are very high that you might lose your existing organic traffic.
• Once you switched your Blogging Platform the probabilities are extremely high that you might lose your existing Subscribers unless you manually update your old Feeds permalink to your new WordPress Feed address. This is the point when the majority of users won’t update their Feeds and hence notice a significant decrease in their traffic.
• You possibly will witness a number of ups and downs in your organic traffic if you won’t bring 301 redirects into play. Our intention is to inform the search engines that we now belong to a new destination (web address).
• After losing your loyal subscribers and search engine ranking, you will notice a significant decrease in your traffic. This will seriously demolish your affiliate earnings i.e. Adsense, Buysellads.com and etc.
• Human visitors have to face lots of difficulties when they try to access your old bookmarked archive link or else if someone links to your old page address, then visitors will not reach your article until or unless they know about the new location of those articles.
• You may face difficulties with your new blogging platform (WordPress) because WordPress in not identical to blogger it requires a bit of knowledge about coding which can be learned from WPBeginner’s Guide.

The Explanation:

Now you know the variety of issues that could affect you if we don’t follow the guidelines correctly. Nevertheless, the good news is that we have a straightforward solution to eliminate all these problems in just one take.
You can easily switch from Blogger to WordPress without losing your Feed subscribers or human visitors, and you can even maintain SERP dominance. There is always a way to shift your all Search engine juice from the old BlogSpot address to your new WordPress blog.

Preparing To Move From Blogger BlogSpot Blog To WordPress:

Before we get started, I would like to give you some intellectual advices which may help you during Blogger to WordPress transformation. It may be a fine idea to set-up a dummy blog first. Also, take complete backup of your Blogger Blog including the posts, comments and even your XML template just to be on the safe side.

Step 1: In case you are about to start your journey in WordPress, purchase web hosting along with a domain and install the latest WordPress software on it.



Step 2: Now you have to import the entire data of your BlogSpot Blog including posts and comments. To do so go to

• WordPress Admin Dashboard >> Tools >> Import
• Now from the list select Blogger.
• Authorize WordPress to access your Google account by pressing the Authorize button.
• After authorizing, you will be able to see a list of Blogger Blogs. Just select that blog you wish to import and within few second, it will import your entire Blogger blog to WordPress.

Step 3: Now copy the above PHP coding and paste it into an empty Notepad document saving it as wpbeginner-blogger.php after which you may use either cPanel or FTP software to upload this file into your WordPress Theme Directory. (Note: You have to upload this wpbeginner-blogger.php file in your theme directory i.e. wp-content/themes/my-theme, where my-theme is the folder name for the theme that you’re using on your WordPress site.)



Step 4: Open your WordPress Admin Dashboard and go to Page >> Add New Page. Write “blogger” in the URL and post title while keeping the post body empty. Now Select “WPBeginner Blogger” from the template drop-down menu and then publish the page.


Step 5: Login to your Blogger account and go to the Newer Blogger Interface >> Template >> Revert to classic template and then you will be able to see an HTML Template box. Just paste the following code into that text box, replacing http://www.wpbeginner.com with your new domain name but make sure you correctly align the http:// and the trailing slash with your web address.

All Done: Open any of your old posts that were previously hosted at Blogger and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress post. Since, we have been using permanent 301 redirect all of the Google PageRank juice will pass to your new WordPress (this takes some time).

How To Update RSS Feeds:

When you move to WordPress the address of your feeds will be changed as well. So to redirect your Blogger Feed to WordPress go to Blogger >> Settings >> Site Feed >> Custom Feed >> and write your new WordPress feed address, and now your old feeds will automatically shift to your new WordPress feeds. You should also consider using FeedBurner for your WordPress feeds.

Resolving Some Common Issues (Your Questions Our Answers)

1. After applying the complete tutorial correctly I am getting a 404 Not Found Error. Answer: The 404 not found page will only come into action if you have either forgotten to upload the WPBeginner-Blogger.php or you’re not uploading it to the correct destination.
2. I am getting a blank screen when I view my old Blogger links. Answer: You are encountering this problem because you have not copied the WPBeginner-Blogger.php file correctly. To resolve this issue replace the existing file with the new one.
3. Everything is fine but still it’s not working. Answer: You will encounter this problem if your WordPress and Blogger Blog don’t have the same permalink structure. WordPress Dashboard >> Settings >> Permalinks >> Custom Structure >> /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html.

We hope that this article helped you to Switch your Blog from Blogger to WordPress. Feel free to leave a comment below!