How to Easily Create a Multilingual Sitemap in WordPress

Translating your website takes a lot of hard work, so it is frustrating when search engines ignore your new pages. A reader recently contacted us with this exact problem, and the problem was a missing multilingual sitemap.

This is a surprisingly common hurdle for website owners. Without a properly configured sitemap, your translated content may never reach the right audience.

Here at WPBeginner, we manage a large multilingual site, so we understand the technical side of international SEO. We know firsthand that a correct sitemap is the secret to getting your translated pages indexed quickly.

In this guide, we will show you the easiest way to create a multilingual sitemap in WordPress. This method ensures search engines can easily find and rank all of your translated content.

Why Create a Multilingual Sitemap in WordPress?

A sitemap is a file that contains all the important content on your WordPress website. It is in the XML format and is targeted toward search engines instead of people.

Creating an XML sitemap is a crucial step for your multilingual SEO strategy. It helps search engines find and index your content faster while maximizing your site’s crawl budget so bots don’t waste time on duplicate pages.

Ultimately, your goal is a perfect indexation rate, which simply means the number of indexed translated pages matches the total number of translated pages you submitted.

For instance, if you have your content translated into multiple languages (whether on different domains, subdomains, or in sub-folders), you will need a separate sitemap for each language.

A good SEO plugin handles this by creating a main sitemap index that links to each language-specific sitemap.

A sitemap is extremely important for your WordPress SEO. Let’s say you just created a new multilingual website. Your new site won’t have many backlinks, and it can be hard for search engines to discover your new articles and pages.

The sitemap provides a way for search engines to learn about your new content in another language. This way, your multilingual pages will start to get indexed and appear in search results.

That being said, let’s take a look at how you can create a multilingual sitemap in WordPress.

Creating a Multilingual Sitemap in WordPress

By default, WordPress automatically creates an XML sitemap for new websites. You can add wp-sitemap.xml at the end of the domain, and WordPress will display the default XML sitemap.

However, this feature is fairly limited and not very flexible. You can’t control which content to add or remove from the sitemap.

The best way to create an XML sitemap in WordPress is by using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin and helps you optimize your site for search engines.

Once you have translated your website using a popular translation plugin like WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress, AIOSEO will automatically create the correct sitemaps for your multilingual site. It also gives you full control over exactly which pages and website sections you want to include.

The sitemap feature is available in the AIOSEO Lite version for free. However, if you’re looking for more features like video sitemaps, news sitemaps, redirections manager, and link assistant, then we recommend using the AIOSEO Pro version.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the AIOSEO plugin. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll see the AIOSEO setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Let’s Get Started’ button and follow the onscreen instructions. For more details, you can visit our guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress.

After that, you’ll need to go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps from your WordPress dashboard and ensure that the ‘Enable Sitemap’ option is enabled.

AIOSEO will automatically create a sitemap for your multilingual website.

You can click the ‘Open Sitemap’ button to preview it, or simply add /sitemap.xml to the end of your root domain name (for example: www.example.com/sitemap.xml).

What you’re seeing is likely a sitemap index. This main file acts like a table of contents, linking to other sitemaps for your posts, pages, and different languages.

AIOSEO does this automatically to keep everything organized and to comply with Google’s rule that a single sitemap cannot contain more than 50,000 URLs! 👍

Please note that if you are using WPML to create multilingual sites, then AIOSEO will automatically serve sitemaps across different languages.

For instance, if you have set up your languages using directories, your sitemap URL will be something like /nl/sitemap.xml, /de/sitemap.xml, or /fr/sitemap.xml.

If you are using TranslatePress to create your WordPress multilingual site, then you will need to install their SEO pack addon, which is fully compatible with AIOSEO.

Configuring Additional Multilingual Sitemap Settings

To further customize your multilingual sitemaps, you can scroll down in AIOSEO Sitemaps settings to view more options.

By default, the plugin lets you include all post types and taxonomies in the sitemap. It also gives the option to include date archives and author sitemaps.

However, you can uncheck the ‘Post Types’ and ‘Taxonomies’ options and view more options.

For example, let’s say you have translated content as a custom post type. You can simply check that option to include in the sitemap and exclude other post types.

Besides that, you can also add more pages from your multilingual website to the sitemap.

For example, if you have a custom-coded HTML landing page on your domain that isn’t a part of WordPress’s posts or pages, you can manually add its URL here to ensure it’s included in your sitemap.

Simply scroll down and click the ‘Additional Page’ toggle to enable the option. After that, you can add the page URL and choose the priority and the frequency.

AIOSEO lets you exclude posts, pages, and specific terms from your WordPress sitemaps.

For instance, you can add different multilingual posts and pages that you don’t want to include in the sitemap.

These might include internal ‘thank you’ pages that users see after submitting a form, or special promotional landing pages that you don’t want appearing in search results.

First, you’ll need to enable the ‘Advanced Settings’ option. Then, enter the URLs in the ‘Exclude Posts / Pages’ field and the terms in the ‘Exclude Terms’ field.

Submitting Your Multilingual Sitemap to Search Engines

Now that you’ve created a multilingual sitemap, the next step is to submit it to different search engines. This way, Google, Bing, and other search engines can easily find new content.

Submit Multilingual Sitemap to Google

Google Search Console is a free tool by Google that you can use to monitor your site’s performance on search results. It helps you see which keywords people use to find your website and resolve any errors that might prevent you from appearing on Google.

Submitting your multilingual sitemap to the Search Console helps Google quickly discover new content.

You can simply log in to your account and head to the ‘Sitemaps’ option from the menu on your left. Next, enter your multilingual sitemap URL under the ‘Add a new sitemap’ option and click the ‘Submit’ button.

Please keep in mind that it can take a few days for Google to crawl and index your new sitemap, so don’t worry if you don’t see results immediately.

For more details, please see our guide on how to submit your website to search engines.

Submit Multilingual Sitemap to Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo

Similarly, you can submit the sitemap to Bing using the Webmaster Tools. The best part is that when you submit your site to Bing, it’s also automatically submitted to the Yahoo and DuckDuckGo search engines.

This happens because Bing actually provides the search data that powers both of these platforms.

You can see our step-by-step tutorial on how to add your website to Bing Webmaster Tools for more details.

Frequently Asked Questions About Multilingual Sitemaps

We often get questions about how to best handle sitemaps for multilingual websites. Below are answers to some of the most common ones we receive.

1. Do I need a separate sitemap for each language?

Yes, this is the best practice for multilingual SEO. A good SEO plugin like All in One SEO will automatically create a separate XML sitemap for each language on your site (e.g., /fr/sitemap.xml for French). This structure makes it very clear for search engines to find, crawl, and index the correct language version of your pages.

2. What is the difference between an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a file created specifically for search engines. It provides a map of all your important content to help bots index your site more efficiently.

In contrast, an HTML sitemap is a visual page on your website designed to help human visitors find content and navigate your site more easily. As an added bonus, HTML sitemaps also improve your internal linking structure, which is great for SEO. Both types of sitemaps are useful for different purposes.

3. How can I check if Google has indexed my multilingual sitemap?

You can check the status of your sitemap inside Google Search Console. Once you log in and select your property, go to the ‘Sitemaps’ report from the menu. If you have submitted your sitemaps correctly, you will see a ‘Success’ status, which confirms Google has processed them.

4. Does WordPress create a multilingual sitemap automatically?

WordPress does create a basic, default XML sitemap, but it has limited functionality and doesn’t properly support multilingual setups. For a multilingual site, it’s essential to use a dedicated SEO plugin like All in One SEO to ensure sitemaps are generated correctly for all your languages and content types.

5. How do hreflang tags work with multilingual sitemaps?

While an XML sitemap tells search engines exactly where your pages are located, hreflang tags tell them which language those pages are written in. Both are essential for international SEO. The good news is that when you pair a top translation plugin with All in One SEO, your sitemaps and hreflang tags are automatically formatted correctly behind the scenes.

6. Which sitemap generator is best for multilingual WordPress sites?

We recommend All in One SEO (AIOSEO) as the best sitemap generator for WordPress. It seamlessly integrates with leading translation plugins like WPML, Polylang, and TranslatePress to automatically generate error-free language index mapping without requiring any code.

Additional Resources on Sitemaps in WordPress

Now that you know how to create a multilingual sitemap, you may like to see some other articles related to sitemaps in WordPress.

• What Is an XML Sitemap? How to Create a Sitemap in WordPress
• How to Add an HTML Sitemap Page in WordPress
• How to Add RSS Sitemap in WordPress (The Easy Way)
• How to Submit Your Website to Search Engines (Beginner’s Guide)
• How to Ask Google to Recrawl URLs of Your WordPress Site
• How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console
• How to Easily Disable the Default WordPress Sitemap

We hope that this article helped you learn how to create a multilingual sitemap in WordPress. You may also want to see our expert SEO tips to optimize your blog posts and our expert pick of the best keyword research tools to improve your SEO rankings.

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