This tutorial covers the following sections:

• Overview
• Where to find site map settings
• Setting a site map
• Adding a site map to the footer
• Adding a site map to the header menu
• What is xml site map and how to configure it
• Frequently asked questions

Overview

A site map lists the major pages of your website to help users and search engine bots find certain information on the site. It shows an overview of the entire site's content on one page. An xml site map makes it easier for a spider to find all site's pages and thus improving SEO capabilities of the site.

Where to find site map settings

To set your site map please navigate to Administration > System > Global Settings > Site Map tab.

Setting a site map

To add pages to your html site map please select relevant options as shown below and press the 'Update' button:

To view the html Site Map please open the browser and type www.yoursite.com/site_map.php where yoursite.com name equals your actual site URL (domain name). The site map looks like:

To add any blocks to your Site Map page, navigate to Administration > CMS > CMS Settings and press the Site Map link. Select the blocks you need from the list of available blocks and add them to any column using the arrows:

The site map page will look as follows:

Adding a site map to the footer

To add the site map to the footer of your site navigate to Administration > CMS > Footer links and fill the required fields:

where

Order defines the order number of the menu link in the footer.

Title is the name that will be shown in the footer.

Menu URL * identifies a script name or URL of the page that is shown when pressing the menu link in the footer.

Press the 'Update' button to save the changes and check the footer. You will be presented with the following result:

Adding a site map to the header menu

To add the site map to the header menu, navigate to Administration > CMS > Site Navigation and click the 'Add New' link. Fill the required fields:

where

Order defines the order number of the menu link in the header.

Layout - select for which template to display the link or leave the 'All' option to show the header menu link for all layouts.

Parent item - select a parent menu item if you want to make the site map link a submenu link.

Title is the name that will be shown in the header.

Menu URL * identifies a script name or URL of the page that is shown when pressing the menu link in the header.

Press the 'Update' button to save the changes and check the header menu. You will be presented with the following result:

What is xml site map and how to configure it

By locating an .xml file with the site map on your web server, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google, Yahoo, Ask) to wisely crawl the website and find out pages from links which have recently been changed to keep them up to date.

To generate the XML site map please follow the steps described below:

1. Set writable permissions to your root folder (this is not very safe) or create two empty files: sitemap_index.xml and sitemap1.xml in the root folder of your shop (via any FTP client program) and give writable access to them.

2. Navigate to Administration > System > Global Settings > Site Map tab and press the 'Build XML site map' button:

Go to your root folder and restore the permissions set above to their default values.

Note: options, like: Show custom pages, show products, etc are selected to be shown for the html site map, not for the xml one.

Frequently asked questions

I have built the sitemap inside the admin panel, but where is the file? Anyone knows where is the file that I need to submit to google sitemap?

The xml site map file is located in your website root directory under the name sitemap1.xml

When generating a site map on the site that contains numerous products, I'm encountering the notice: Notice: Undefined variable: total_count in /public_html/admin/admin_site_map_xml_build.php on line 738

We would recommend you to download an updated version of the file from here

I'm having a few problems with sitemap on version 3.6

We would recommend you to download an updated version of the file from here

I'm using a multisite feature and a site map is generated for one site only for version 3.5

Please, download the patch from here