Joomla Sitemap Generator
The Sitemap Generator uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every extension out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once.
If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this extension, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most Joomla users do), it would be wise to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap.
Features
- Simple setup.
- Works out of the box with all Joomla extensions.
- Low computations costs for your webserver.
- Uses the Joomla update function.
Technical Features
- Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive).
- You could use the user-agent MB-SitemapGenerator to control the crawler.
- Support for robots (noindex) meta elements.
- Adds nearly all indexable filetypes (for example .pdf, .xls, .doc) to the sitemap.
- See the document Sitemap Generator Data on my website for more information.
Additional Technical Features of the Professional Version
- Generation of image sitemaps.
- Generation of video sitemaps.
- Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported.
Upcoming Technical Features
- Support for Vimeo videos in video sitemaps.
- Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps.
- Automatic daily creation of sitemaps.
Requirements
- Joomla 3 or higher.
- Linux webserver (not tested with Windows yet, but should work).
- cURL 7.18.1 or higher.
- PHP 5.3 should be compiled against a compatible cURL version in the most cases. PHP 5.4 or higher should by default provide a compatible cURL version.
Screenshots
User Interface of the Sitemap Generator
Installation Instructions
- Download the installation package.
- Install the package.
- Go to Components -> Sitemap Generator in the backend and use the Generate your sitemap button to start the generation process. The sitemap will be saved as sitemap.xml in your Joomla root directory. Be aware that an existing sitemap.xml file would be overwritten without asking.
- Use the "Show the sitemap" button to download your sitemap and check if the generated sitemap is complete.
Limitations of the Basic Version
The Sitemap Generator service allows you to create a sitemap with up to 500 URLs for free. If your website has more URLs or you like to integrate an image or video sitemap, you could buy the professional version to create a sitemap with up to 50000 URLs at the following website. The joomla extension itself is free of charge, but nearly useless without the external service. Please note that also not indexable URLs (for example .zip files) count to the quota.
Pricing of the Sitemap Generator Professional
| URL Limit per sitemap | Price for one year | Images | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 URLs | Free of charge | Not supported | Not supported |
| 25'000 URLs | 35.00 € | Indexed | Indexed |
| 50'000 URLs | 75.00 € | Indexed | Indexed |
| 100'000 URLs | 145.00 € | Indexed | Indexed |
| 200'000 URLs | 295.00 € | Indexed | Indexed |
| 500'000 URLs | 745.00 € | Indexed | Indexed |
| More than 500'000 URLs | Please contact me for an offer. | Indexed | Indexed |
Please note that also not indexable URLs (for example .zip files) count to the quota.
Warnings
If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your Joomla root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine.
It is also noteworthy that the plugin does only check if the current user is allowed to login to the admin interface. If so, the current user is allowed to generate a sitemap. The permissions or access level of the module do not affect the plugin.
Pre-Installation Verification Test
If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the extension, you could use the Online Sitemap Generator on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps.
Use of an External Server
The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the extension, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using Joomla. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.
Module and Plugin
The Sitemap Generator module and plugin are no longer necessary and thus the development has discontinued.