What does a sitemap do and what is its purpose?
You have two types of sitemaps:
- for visitors
- for search engines such as Google.
The sitemap for visitors is a summary page with all the links on the website that are important to the visitor. The sitemap for search engines works differently.
The purpose of a sitemap for search engines is to present all your pages as clearly as possible to search engines like Google and Bing. This is important when the website is indexed.
Google and other search engines value a search engine. It will not make the website rank higher in Google, but it usually contributes to an easy and quick indexing a website. Also, more pages will often be indexed by search engines.
To avoid having to create and maintain a sitemap yourself, there are several plugins available.
For WordPress, these are free-to-use plugins like Google XML Sitemaps or as part of the plugin SEO by Yoast.
This plugin ensures that new pages are automatically added to the sitemap, so keeping them up to date is automatic. However, you do need to set which pages should be indexed in advance and how often.
However, a sitemap really only makes sense for websites with many pages and/or blog posts.
The fact is that Google likes a sitemap and that is usually a good reason for website owners to do it.