Manage your XML sitemaps

 You can use XML sitemaps to tell Google and the other search engines that your site has been updated. While WordPress finally has native XML sitemaps, our solution is more powerful. Our WordPress SEO plugin automatically configures your XML sitemaps, so you don’t have to worry about anything. We generate sitemaps for your different post types, including your images, and make sure that it generates and loads quickly.

We intelligently split your sitemaps into smaller bits, so Google only has to fetch one new XML “sub”-sitemap when a post is published.

You can check and manage which types of content, archives, and templates should be included in your XML sitemaps in your Yoast SEO → APIs → XML Sitemaps settings. Content types that are set to not show in search results will be automatically excluded from your XML sitemaps.

Lastly, our XML sitemaps support has a complete API, allowing developers to add or change functionality through their plugins and themes. Our Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO extensions (which generate their specific sitemaps) are built on this API. Other plugins frequently develop their solutions on top of our system.

4. Speed up your WordPress website

If your website is slow, you risk frustrating your users. That makes them less likely to engage, browse, convert, or visit again. That, in turn, can make them less likely to share your content, link to your pages, or recommend your brand. In short, speed is an essential part of WordPress SEO, and a huge part of the overall user experience. That means it’s critical to measure and manage your performance — especially for users on mobile or slower connections!

With Google’s Page Experience update, page speed and user experiences are front and center. Offering outstanding performance will continue to become more critical by the day.

4.1. Measure your site speed

Measuring the speed of your site can be confusing. Different tools give different scores and results and sometimes even give conflicting information. That’s why we’ve put together this helpful guide on how to measure your speed — it’ll walk you through the basics of picking the right metrics to use the right tools for the job when it comes to monitoring and diagnosing issues.

4.2. Improve your site speed

Once you’ve identified what and where your bottlenecks are, the next challenge is to make hosting, theme, plugin, and performance tweaks to speed things up.

Page speed optimization is a discipline that spans well beyond WordPress SEO. That means that the most significant opportunities will vary from site to site and from situation to situation. For some sites, the easiest wins might come from changing hosting or utilizing a CDN; for others, it might mean re-assessing their use of plugins or altering how they load CSS and JavaScript.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t get started, though. We’ve put together a guide on some page speed tools and easy wins that you can use to get the ball rolling.