Differences between HTML and XML sitemaps

[mouakter13]

WordPress error messages are often confusing and difficult to resolve, but the “Your sitemap appears to be an HTML page” error is luckily not one of them.

If you've encountered this problem, you're probably wondering what this error means, what's wrong with your sitemap being HTML, and how exactly you can fix this problem. And what if your sitemap is already formatted properly and you're still seeing this error?

We'll explain everything to you: how a sitemap works , the format it should have, and some different ways to solve this problem.

Check out our video tutorial to fix the “Your Sitemap Appears to Be an HTML Page” error:

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What is a sitemap?
Do you know how search engines find your website ? The answer is with a little robot called a web crawler, an automated tool sent by search engines to index the pages of your site.

With millions of pages on the web, gathering information about every bolivia phone number data site would be impossible for humans. Web crawlers scour the Internet, caching information about every page and media outlet.

That seems simple enough, but Google doesn't automatically know when you add a new page to your site, like when you publish a blog post or launch a new product in your store. They periodically send the web crawler to visit your site to see if you've changed anything, but the process isn't instantaneous.

When you have a huge website, it's normal for the crawler to miss key pages even after several visits. This is especially a problem when those pages are not linked to frequently.

That's where sitemaps come in to help crawlers. These XML files are different from a normal page on your site; they're usually unreadable to humans and aren't meant to be seen by visitors. But web crawlers can use them to make sure everything gets indexed.