If you want to rank on Google (and other search engines) you need to be able to tell the world what your site consists of. A sitemap is used by the Googlebot, BingBot, DuckDuckBot and other search engines to tell them what pages are available.

This guide will take a lot of the learnings from the post I wrote on Making an RSS Feed for your SvelteKit Project and expand on it for use as a sitemap.

So as with the RSS post I'll be using Matt Jennings' awesome SvelteKit blog template for this example.

If you haven't seen the last guide that's fine I'll include a lot of the steps in here so there's no need to cross reference.

Sitemap route

If you haven't done so already and want to follow along then clone the repo and install the dependencies and spin up the dev server, the default port is 3000:

# using SSH
git clone git@github.com:mattjennings/sveltekit-blog-template
# using HTTPS
git clone https://github.com/mattjennings/sveltekit-blog-template
cd sveltekit-blog-template
npm i
npm run dev

If I open up Matt's SvelteKit blog template in VS Code this is how it is structured:

sveltekit-blog-template/
├─ posts/
│ └─ getting-started/
│   └─ index.md
├─ src/
│ └─ lib/
│ └─ routes/
│ │ └─ posts/
│ │   └─ [slug].svelte/
│ │─ __layout.svelte/
│ └─ index.svelte/
...rest of the files

Currently it's an index page and a posts directory, the index page is the site homepage and the posts directory will take a slug that's passed to the [slug].svelte file (example getting-started) and turn that into localhost:3000/posts/getting-started.

A sitemap is generally located at the root level of a site, so in the case of my site it's https://scottspence.com/sitemap.xml.

I'll create the sitemap file as sitemap.xml.js in SvelteKit endpoints you can define the type of data you want to return, in this case it's XML.

I'll create the sitemap file via the terminal:

touch src/routes/sitemap.xml.js

If I go to localhost:3000/sitemap.xml I get a 404.

Now I need to create a get() function to return the sitemap XML and headers for the endpoint.

For now I'll put in some XML headings for the body, I'll move the XML out into it's own function later, for now this is just to get a bit of visual feedback:

export async function get() {
  const headers = {
    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0, s-maxage=3600',
    'Content-Type': 'application/xml',
  }
  return {
    headers,
    body: `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <urlset
      xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:news="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
      xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:mobile="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0"
      xmlns:image="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
      xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"
    ></urlset>`,
  }
}

Going to localhost:3000/sitemap.xml now a get the beginnings of my sitemap XML feed.

In the headers I'm setting the expiration to an hour with s-maxage and for the body adding in the XML heading. You can check out the W3C Feed Validation Service for more detail on what's needed here.

The schemas (xmlns:news etc) are used to tell the search engines what type of data you're returning. I've used Josh Comeau's sitemap as an example here. You can check out Sitemaps XML format over on sitemaps.org for more information.

Now if I go check localhost:3000/rss.xml I get the beginning of my RSS feed.

Hardcoding pages into the sitemap

First up I'll tackle the first url which isn't going to change, the site URL.

In Matt's template there's an info.js file that contains the project name and website links. I'll import the website and use that.

import { website } from '$lib/info'

export async function get() {
  const headers = {
    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0, s-maxage=3600',
    'Content-Type': 'application/xml',
  }
  return {
    headers,
    body: `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <urlset
      xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:news="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
      xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:mobile="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0"
      xmlns:image="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
      xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"
    >
      <url>
        <loc>${website}</loc>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>0.7</priority>
      </url>
    </urlset>`,
  }
}

That was straightforward enough, right? That's only one page though so the Googlebot isn't going to be doing much with that.

Adding posts to sitemap

Because the posts routes are dynamically generated I'll need to create a little helper function for the posts, I'll use a trimmed down version of what Matt uses in the homepage (src/routes/index.js) to get the posts.

I'll create a get-posts.js in the lib directory of the project:

# create the file
touch src/lib/get-posts.js

Here's what the function for getPosts looks like:

export async function getPosts() {
  const posts = await Object.entries(import.meta.globEager('/posts/**/*.md'))
    // get post metadata
    .map(([, post]) => post.metadata)
    // sort by date
    .sort((a, b) => (a.date < b.date ? 1 : -1))

  return posts
}

I can now import that into the sitemap.xml.js file so I can map over the posts returned from the getPosts function inside the XML markup using tags ${}.

Before I do that though I'll move the markup out into a function so it's not cluttering up the return of the get() function.

I can pass the posts from the getPosts() function into this, then I can map over each post and render out the markup for each one:

const sitemap = posts => `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset
  xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:news="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:mobile="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0"
  xmlns:image="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
  xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"
>
  <url>
    <loc>${website}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  ${posts
    .map(post =>
      post.isPrivate
        ? null
        : `
  <url>
    <loc>${website}/posts/${post.slug}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  `
    )
    .join('')}
</urlset>`

Now in the get function I'll pass the posts from the getPosts() into the sitemap function and use that for the body return of getPosts().

Here's the full file:

import { getPosts } from '$lib/get-posts'
import { website } from '$lib/info'

export async function get() {
  const posts = await getPosts()
  const body = sitemap(posts)

  const headers = {
    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0, s-maxage=3600',
    'Content-Type': 'application/xml',
  }
  return {
    headers,
    body,
  }
}

const sitemap = posts => `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset
  xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:news="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:mobile="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0"
  xmlns:image="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
  xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"
>
  <url>
    <loc>${website}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  ${posts
    .map(post =>
      post.isPrivate
        ? null
        : `
  <url>
    <loc>${website}/posts/${post.slug}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  `
    )
    .join('')}
</urlset>`

Next steps from here

There's some aspects of this project that wont change very often, like the routes for the homepage, about page etc. I could hardcode these into the XML directly.

But rather than doing that I can add the pages to an array variable so that I can add any new pages that exist in the src/routes to it.

I can add any new pages to the array rather than creating a new <url> element for each new page that's added. Here's an example of how that may look:

import { getPosts } from '$lib/get-posts'
import { website } from '$lib/info'

export async function get() {
  const posts = await getPosts()
  const pages = [`about`, `newsletter`, `privacy-policy`]
  const body = sitemap(posts, pages)

  const headers = {
    'Cache-Control': 'max-age=0, s-maxage=3600',
    'Content-Type': 'application/xml',
  }
  return {
    headers,
    body,
  }
}

const sitemap = (posts, pages) => `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset
  xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:news="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  xmlns:mobile="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0"
  xmlns:image="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
  xmlns:video="https://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"
>
  <url>
    <loc>${website}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  ${pages
    .map(
      page => `
  <url>
    <loc>${website}/${page}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  `
    )
    .join('')}
  ${posts
    .map(post =>
      post.isPrivate
        ? null
        : `
  <url>
    <loc>${website}/posts/${post.slug}</loc>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
  `
    )
    .join('')}
</urlset>`

Conclusion

Alright, I've gone through and created a sitemap that contains all the pages on the project.

I hope this has given you enough information to get started with making your own sitemap on your SvelteKit projects.

Make a Sitemap with SvelteKit

Sitemap route

Hardcoding pages into the sitemap

Adding posts to sitemap

Next steps from here

Conclusion