A No-Drama XML & Google News Sitemap for Serious WordPress Sites

If you’ve ever tried to find a reliable sitemap plugin for a serious WordPress site, you already know the struggle:

  • Plugins that work fine on 1,000 posts but die at 50,000+ posts
  • Google News sitemaps showing only a handful of your latest articles
  • Partially empty sitemaps, missing URLs, broken pagination
  • robots.txt polluted with old or wrong sitemap entries
  • No .gz support for large sitemaps, or mismatched content

Simple Sitemap Generator was built specifically to fix all of that.

It’s a lightweight, virtual sitemap plugin that:

  • Handles both small blogs and 100K+ post monsters
  • Generates Google News-ready sitemaps directly from the database
  • Produces XML, XML.GZ, and TXT sitemaps with proper pagination
  • Integrates cleanly with robots.txt, overriding old sitemap lines
  • Is built for Google, Bing, Yandex and any engine that understands sitemaps

If you care about fast crawling, accurate indexing, and zero sitemap headaches, this plugin is your new best friend.

Why Another Sitemap Plugin?

Most “SEO suites” ship with sitemaps, but they’re designed for average-sized sites, not for:

  • High-frequency news sites
  • Big archives with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts
  • Heavy use of tags and categories

Once your site becomes “big”, common problems start showing up:

  • Sitemaps load slowly or time out
  • Google News sitemaps show only a fraction of the last 48 hours of posts
  • TXT sitemaps contain just a few URLs instead of full coverage
  • Some sitemap pages are empty or invalid
  • robots.txt still points to old or wrong sitemap URLs

Simple Sitemap Generator is shaped by that pain. It’s built to stay stable and correct even when your site is massive.

What Simple Sitemap Generator Does

The plugin generates 100% virtual (dynamic) sitemaps:

XML Sitemaps

  • /sitemap-index.xml – Main XML sitemap index
  • /sitemap-pages.xml – Static pages
  • /sitemap-categories.xml – Categories
  • /sitemap-posts.xml, /sitemap-posts-2.xml, /sitemap-posts-3.xml, …
  • /sitemap-tags.xml, /sitemap-tags-2.xml, /sitemap-tags-3.xml, …
  • /sitemap-news.xml – Google News sitemap (last 48 hours)

TXT Sitemaps

  • /sitemap-index.txt – TXT sitemap index
  • /sitemap.txt – Alias of /sitemap-index.txt
  • /sitemap-pages.txt, /sitemap-categories.txt
  • /sitemap-posts.txt, /sitemap-posts-2.txt, …
  • /sitemap-tags.txt, /sitemap-tags-2.txt, …
  • /sitemap-news.txt – URLs in the News sitemap

Gzipped XML Sitemaps

For better performance and crawl efficiency, the plugin also generates gzipped XML versions of every XML sitemap:

  • /sitemap-index.xml.gz
  • /sitemap-pages.xml.gz
  • /sitemap-categories.xml.gz
  • /sitemap-posts.xml.gz, /sitemap-posts-2.xml.gz, …
  • /sitemap-tags.xml.gz, /sitemap-tags-2.xml.gz, …
  • /sitemap-news.xml.gz

These .xml.gz files are:

  • Generated on the fly
  • Perfectly synchronized with the underlying .xml (same content, just compressed)
  • Explicitly listed in robots.txt so search engines can pick them up

All of this happens without writing any physical files to disk.

Why This Matters for Google, Bing & Yandex

Search engines love clear, accurate, and fast sitemaps.

With Simple Sitemap Generator:

  • Google and Bing can discover and re-crawl URLs faster
  • Yandex and others can rely on both XML and TXT formats
  • News content is exposed via a proper Google News sitemap
  • Large sitemaps are split into 999-URL chunks for stability
  • .xml.gz versions reduce bandwidth while keeping content identical

If your current sitemaps are:

  • Timing out
  • Returning inconsistent URLs
  • Only partially listing your real content

…then your crawl and indexation are leaving traffic on the table.

This plugin is designed so even a 100,000+ post site can have:

  • Stable and fast sitemaps
  • Correct coverage across posts, tags, pages, categories
  • A reliable News sitemap for the last 48 hours
  • Clean robots.txt that always points to the right URLs

Key Features at a Glance

1. 100% Virtual, No Files on Disk

  • Uses WordPress rewrite rules and custom query vars
  • No static sitemap.xml or robots.txt files are created
  • Perfect for shared hosting, managed WordPress, and locked environments

2. Built for Large Sites (50K–100K+ Posts)

  • Posts and tags are split into multiple sitemaps with up to 999 URLs each

Example for posts:

  • /sitemap-posts.xml
  • /sitemap-posts-2.xml
  • /sitemap-posts-3.xml

Same logic applies to tags:

  • /sitemap-tags.xml
  • /sitemap-tags-2.xml
  • /sitemap-tags-3.xml

This keeps each sitemap lightweight and fast to parse, even on huge archives.

3. True Google News Sitemap (Last 2 Days, Direct From DB)

The plugin generates a proper Google News sitemap:

  • /sitemap-news.xml – Full news XML
  • /sitemap-news.txt – URL-only list of recent news content

How it works:

  • Fetches posts from the last 48 hours using direct SQL queries
  • Ignores theme/SEO plugin queries that often break news sitemaps
  • Respects excluded categories (so you can keep specific sections out of News)
  • For each news URL, it includes:
    • Publication name (configurable in plugin settings)
    • Language (from site settings)
    • Publication date (per post)
    • Title
    • Keywords (from post tags)
    • Featured image (if available)

For high-frequency news sites, this is critical: you want EVERY article from the last 48 hours to show up here, not just 5–10 random ones.

4. XML + TXT Sitemaps for Maximum Flexibility

The plugin exposes both:

  • XML sitemaps – for search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.)
  • TXT sitemaps – for quick debugging and integration with tools (e.g., crawlers, bulk URL submission)

TXT endpoints mirror XML structure:

  • Index: /sitemap-index.txt, /sitemap.txt
  • Content-specific:
    • /sitemap-pages.txt
    • /sitemap-categories.txt
    • /sitemap-posts.txt, /sitemap-posts-2.txt, …
    • /sitemap-tags.txt, /sitemap-tags-2.txt, …
    • /sitemap-news.txt

Perfect when you want to:

  • Feed URLs into a third-party crawler
  • Quickly verify exact URLs included in each sitemap chunk
  • Build custom monitoring around sitemap coverage

5. Gzipped XML Sitemaps (.xml.gz) for Heavy Duty Crawling

Large sites benefit heavily from gzipped sitemaps:

  • Smaller payload → faster download → more efficient crawl
  • Standardized format supported by Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.

Simple Sitemap Generator automatically provides .xml.gz versions for all XML endpoints, including paginated ones:

  • sitemap-index.xml.gz
  • sitemap-pages.xml.gz
  • sitemap-categories.xml.gz
  • sitemap-posts.xml.gz, sitemap-posts-2.xml.gz, …
  • sitemap-tags.xml.gz, sitemap-tags-2.xml.gz, …
  • sitemap-news.xml.gz

Under the hood:

  1. The plugin fetches the XML sitemap output
  2. Compresses it with gzencode()
  3. Serves it with proper headers (application/x-gzip)

Most importantly:
robots.txt explicitly lists both .xml and .xml.gz versions, so search engines can choose whichever they prefer.

TXT .gz endpoints also exist (for tools), but only XML .gz are advertised in robots.txt (clean & standard behavior).

6. Smart robots.txt Integration (Even if Other Plugins Mess With It)

WordPress generates robots.txt dynamically, and many plugins try to inject their own “Sitemap” lines.

Simple Sitemap Generator:

  1. Hooks into robots_txt with a very high priority,
  2. Takes the existing robots.txt content (from core + other plugins),
  3. Removes all previous Sitemap: lines, even if minified,
  4. Appends its own, correct sitemap list, including:
    • sitemap-index.xml and sitemap-index.xml.gz
    • XML + TXT sitemaps for pages, categories
    • All post and tag sitemaps (including paginated & gzipped XML)
    • Google News sitemap XML (.xml + .xml.gz) and TXT

It keeps all your existing:

  • User-agent rules
  • Allow / Disallow directives

…but guarantees that Sitemap: entries are clean, correct, and fully controlled by this plugin.

7. Flexible Content Controls

From the plugin’s settings page (Settings → Simple Sitemap Generator), you can:

  • Enable/disable sitemap support for:
    • Posts
    • Pages
  • Toggle:
    • Tags sitemaps
    • Categories sitemaps
    • Google News sitemap
  • Set your Google News publication name
  • Exclude specific categories entirely from:
    • Post sitemaps
    • Google News sitemap

This lets you tailor which parts of your content ecosystem are exposed to search engines and which are kept internal or low-profile.

How It Works Under the Hood

For developers & technical SEO folks, here’s what’s going on:

  • All sitemap URLs (/sitemap-posts-3.xml, /sitemap-tags-12.xml) are handled via custom rewrite rules and query vars (no templates to manage, no static files).
  • The plugin uses direct SQL for:
    • Counting posts for pagination
    • Fetching correct slices for each posts sitemap page
    • Fetching last-48h posts for Google News
  • Tags are loaded via get_terms() with offset + limit, mirroring the same 999-per-page logic.
  • News sitemap uses official Google News & Image namespaces:
    • xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
    • xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"

All of this is tested on:

  • Smaller sites with a few thousand posts
  • Larger sites with 50,000–110,000+ posts
  • Active publishing environments pushing multiple posts daily

Installation & Configuration

  1. Upload & Activate the Plugin
    Upload the plugin folder to /wp-content/plugins/ and activate it in Plugins → Installed Plugins.
  2. Configure Settings
    Go to Settings → Simple Sitemap Generator and set:

    • Included post types (Posts, Pages)
    • Whether to include Tags, Categories, and Google News
    • Google News publication name
    • Categories to exclude
  3. Refresh Permalinks
    Go to Settings → Permalinks and click Save Changes once (this flushes rewrite rules so all sitemap URLs work).
  4. Verify Key Endpoints
    Check:

    • /sitemap-index.xml
    • /sitemap-index.xml.gz
    • /sitemap-posts.xml, /sitemap-posts-2.xml
    • /sitemap-tags.xml, /sitemap-tags-2.xml
    • /sitemap-news.xml
    • /robots.txt – make sure:
      • Old external sitemaps are gone
      • New .xml + .xml.gz entries are present

Use Cases

This plugin is ideal if you:

  • Run a news site that depends on Google News visibility
  • Manage a large archive site with tens of thousands of posts
  • Are tired of sitemap issues caused by generic SEO plugins
  • Want both XML and TXT representations of your content
  • Care about proper .xml.gz support for efficient crawling
  • Need a clean robots.txt that accurately reflects your current sitemap structure

Download Simple Sitemap Generator

You can download the plugin and install it on your WordPress site like any normal plugin.

Once activated and configured, you’ll have:

  • Robust XML sitemaps
  • Fast and readable TXT sitemaps
  • A reliable Google News sitemap
  • Fully working gzipped XML sitemaps (.xml.gz)
  • And a robots.txt that stays in sync with your real URLs.

Screenshot Gallery

Simple Sitemap Generator

Simple Sitemap Generator2

  • Plugin settings UI
  • /sitemap-index.xml in browser
  • /sitemap-posts.xml with multiple pages
  • /sitemap-news.xml with news: and image: nodes
  • /sitemap-index.xml.gz response headers (for the nerds)
  • robots.txt showing all Sitemap + Sitemap .gz lines

If you’re like most technical SEOs, devs, or publishers, you don’t want your sitemap to be “just okay”—you want it to be bulletproof.

Simple Sitemap Generator is built exactly for that:
No drama, no bloat, no broken sitemaps — just a clean, scalable, Google News–ready sitemap system for WordPress.