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Do you need to pay for an XML sitemap generator?

Published October 30, 2026

What a sitemap does and does not do

Google's Search Central documentation describes a sitemap as a file listing the pages, videos and other files on your site. It helps search engines find your URLs. Google also says it doesn't guarantee every listed item will be crawled and indexed.

If pages are missing from search, a sitemap alone may not solve the cause. The SEO indexing guide covers what to investigate after discovery.

Sitemaps you already have for free

If you run WordPress 5.5 or later, you probably have one. According to the WordPress core team's announcement, sitemaps are on by default, with an index at /wp-sitemap.xml. They cover public post types, taxonomies, author archives and the homepage.

Each sitemap holds up to 2,000 entries by default. Image, video and news sitemaps aren't included.

SEO plugins replace or extend that. The free Yoast SEO plugin lists XML sitemaps among its features on its WordPress.org page. Yoast SEO Premium is $118.80 a year, excluding VAT, for one site. It bundles the News SEO plugin for news sitemaps, plus Video SEO.

Rank Math's free version lists an XML sitemap. Its paid plans add Google News and video sitemaps; ask Rank Math for the US-dollar license cost if you need those options. If you're still choosing a plugin, see the WordPress SEO tools guide.

Free and paid generators for other sites

For a static site, one option is a generator that crawls the pages and writes the file. By type of site, the options look like this:

• WordPress: the core sitemap or your SEO plugin's sitemap. A paid plugin matters mainly for news or video sitemaps.
• Small static HTML site: a free online generator or a free crawler, rerun whenever you add pages.
• Large catalog or frequently changing site: a generator with enough capacity and automatic updates, or a sitemap built by your own platform.

XML-Sitemaps.com's free tier generates a sitemap for up to 500 pages with no registration. It fills in last-modified dates from the server response and sets priority lower for deeper pages. The Pro plan, from $2.44 a month, adds sites of any size and automatic updates. It also covers multiple websites and image, video and news sitemaps.

Screaming Frog builds a sitemap from a completed crawl. By default it includes only HTML pages that return a 200 status. The free version stops at 500 URLs.

Crawling more requires an annual license, subject to the machine's memory and storage. Ask Screaming Frog for the US-dollar license price; the Screaming Frog pricing guide covers licensing.

When size forces a different setup

Google limits a single sitemap file to 50,000 URLs or 50MB uncompressed, whichever you hit first. A bigger site needs several sitemap files tied together by a sitemap index.

Screaming Frog creates the extra files and the index automatically once a crawl passes 49,999 URLs. WordPress core already splits its output at 2,000 entries per file, and its index holds up to 50,000 sitemaps.

For a large catalog, budget for updates as products come and go. Compare that recurring task with a one-time export in /seo-tools-cost-calculator/.

News content and frequent catalog changes create different reasons to pay. A single WordPress site that needs a news sitemap gets one with Yoast SEO Premium at $118.80 a year. A site without a CMS that has passed 500 pages and changes often gets automatic updates from XML-Sitemaps.com's Pro plan, from $2.44 a month.

Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.

Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.