Sitemap generator¶

This document describes how to create XML sitemaps for your Wagtail website using the wagtail.contrib.sitemaps module.

Note

As of Wagtail 1.10 the Django contrib sitemap app is used to generate sitemaps. However since Wagtail requires the Site instance to be available during the sitemap generation you will have to use the views from the wagtail.contrib.sitemaps.views module instead of the views provided by Django (django.contrib.sitemaps.views).

The usage of these views is otherwise identical, which means that customisation and caching of the sitemaps are done using the default Django patterns. See the Django documentation for in-depth information.

Basic configuration¶

You firstly need to add "django.contrib.sitemaps" to INSTALLED_APPS in your Django settings file:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...

    "django.contrib.sitemaps",
]

Then, in urls.py, you need to add a link to the wagtail.contrib.sitemaps.views.sitemap view which generates the sitemap:

from wagtail.contrib.sitemaps.views import sitemap

urlpatterns = [
    ...

    path('sitemap.xml', sitemap),

    ...

    # Ensure that the 'sitemap' line appears above the default Wagtail page serving route
    re_path(r'', include(wagtail_urls)),
]

You should now be able to browse to /sitemap.xml and see the sitemap working. By default, all published pages in your website will be added to the site map.

Setting the hostname¶

By default, the sitemap uses the hostname defined in the Wagtail Admin’s Sites area. If your default site is called localhost, then URLs in the sitemap will look like:

<url>
    <loc>http://localhost/about/</loc>
    <lastmod>2015-09-26</lastmod>
</url>

For tools like Google Search Tools to properly index your site, you need to set a valid, crawlable hostname. If you change the site’s hostname from localhost to mysite.com, sitemap.xml will contain the correct URLs:

<url>
    <loc>http://mysite.com/about/</loc>
    <lastmod>2015-09-26</lastmod>
</url>

If you change the site’s port to 443, the https scheme will be used. Find out more about working with Sites.

Customising¶

URLs¶

The Page class defines a get_sitemap_urls method which you can override to customise sitemaps per Page instance. This method must accept a request object and return a list of dictionaries, one dictionary per URL entry in the sitemap. You can exclude pages from the sitemap by returning an empty list.

Each dictionary can contain the following:

location (required) - This is the full URL path to add into the sitemap.
lastmod - A python date or datetime set to when the page was last modified.
changefreq
priority

You can add more but you will need to override the sitemap.xml template in order for them to be displayed in the sitemap.

Serving multiple sitemaps¶

If you want to support the sitemap indexes from Django then you will need to use the index view from wagtail.contrib.sitemaps.views instead of the index view from django.contrib.sitemaps.views. Please see the Django documentation for further details.