Sitemap Template

A single Sitemap template is used to generate the sitemap.xml file. Hugo automatically comes with this template file. No work is needed on the users’ part unless they want to customize sitemap.xml.

A sitemap is a Page and therefore has all the page variables available to use in this template along with Sitemap-specific ones:

.Sitemap.ChangeFreq

The page change frequency

.Sitemap.Priority

The priority of the page

.Sitemap.Filename

The sitemap filename

If provided, Hugo will use /layouts/sitemap.xml instead of the internal sitemap.xml template that ships with Hugo.

Sitemap Templates

Hugo has built-on Sitemap templates, but you can provide your own if needed, in either layouts/sitemap.xml or layouts/_default/sitemap.xml.

For multilingual sites, we also create a Sitemap index. You can provide a custom layout for that in either layouts/sitemapindex.xml or layouts/_default/sitemapindex.xml.

Hugo’s sitemap.xml

This template respects the version 0.9 of the Sitemap Protocol.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  {{ range .Data.Pages }}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ .Permalink }}</loc>{{ if not .Lastmod.IsZero }}
    <lastmod>{{ safeHTML ( .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05-07:00" ) }}</lastmod>{{ end }}{{ with .Sitemap.ChangeFreq }}
    <changefreq>{{ . }}</changefreq>{{ end }}{{ if ge .Sitemap.Priority 0.0 }}
    <priority>{{ .Sitemap.Priority }}</priority>{{ end }}{{ if .IsTranslated }}{{ range .Translations }}
    <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="{{ .Lang }}"
                href="{{ .Permalink }}"
                />{{ end }}
    <xhtml:link
                rel="alternate"
                hreflang="{{ .Lang }}"
                href="{{ .Permalink }}"
                />{{ end }}
  </url>
  {{ end }}
</urlset>

Hugo’s sitemapindex.xml

This is used to create a Sitemap index in multilingual mode:

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	{{ range . }}
	<sitemap>
	   	<loc>{{ .SitemapAbsURL }}</loc>
		{{ if not .LastChange.IsZero }}
	   	<lastmod>{{ .LastChange.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05-07:00" | safeHTML }}</lastmod>
		{{ end }}
	</sitemap>
	{{ end }}
</sitemapindex>

Configure sitemap.xml

Defaults for <changefreq>, <priority> and filename values can be set in the site’s config file, e.g.:

sitemap:
  changefreq: monthly
  filename: sitemap.xml
  priority: 0.5

[sitemap]
  changefreq = "monthly"
  filename = "sitemap.xml"
  priority = 0.5

{
   "sitemap": {
      "changefreq": "monthly",
      "filename": "sitemap.xml",
      "priority": 0.5
   }
}

The same fields can be specified in an individual content file’s front matter in order to override the value assigned to that piece of content at render time.