Building a Better Sitemap.xml with Jekyll

In the past several months I’ve made many incremental improvements to this website, including how I generate my Sitemap.xml. While my revisions are certainly not jaw dropping, they have definitely improved the quality of my sitemap and are thus worth writing about, if only to provide a reference point to other developers. To that end, here’s a note about the changes I’ve made in my current implementation.

Previous Configuration

In an earlier post, Generating a Sitemap in Jekyll without a Plugin, I went over the configuration of my previous sitemap, which looked like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
      {% if post.lastmod == null %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% else %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.lastmod | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
      <priority>1.0</priority>
    </url>
  {% endfor %}
  {% for page in site.pages %}
    {% if page.sitemap != null and page.sitemap != empty %}
      <url>
        <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ page.url }}</loc>
        <lastmod>{{ page.sitemap.lastmod | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
        <changefreq>{{ page.sitemap.changefreq }}</changefreq>
        <priority>{{ page.sitemap.priority }}</priority>
       </url>
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
</urlset>

Current Configuration

For my current implementation, I made the following changes:

The urlset is much more terse as I stripped away all the attributes, save for xmlns
All posts and pages are added to the sitemap, unless they’ve been explicitly set to be unpublished and excluded, respectively
The changefreq and priority elements for pages and posts may be omitted, as those elements now have fallback values.

---
layout: null
sitemap:
  exclude: 'yes'
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    {% unless post.published == false %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
      {% if post.sitemap.lastmod %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.sitemap.lastmod | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</lastmod>
      {% elsif post.date %}
        <lastmod>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% else %}
        <lastmod>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
      {% if post.sitemap.changefreq %}
        <changefreq>{{ post.sitemap.changefreq }}</changefreq>
      {% else %}
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      {% endif %}
      {% if post.sitemap.priority %}
        <priority>{{ post.sitemap.priority }}</priority>
      {% else %}
        <priority>0.5</priority>
      {% endif %}
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}
  {% for page in site.pages %}
    {% unless page.sitemap.exclude == "yes" %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ page.url | remove: "index.html" }}</loc>
      {% if page.sitemap.lastmod %}
        <lastmod>{{ page.sitemap.lastmod | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</lastmod>
      {% elsif page.date %}
        <lastmod>{{ page.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% else %}
        <lastmod>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
      {% if page.sitemap.changefreq %}
        <changefreq>{{ page.sitemap.changefreq }}</changefreq>
      {% else %}
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      {% endif %}
      {% if page.sitemap.priority %}
        <priority>{{ page.sitemap.priority }}</priority>
      {% else %}
        <priority>0.3</priority>
      {% endif %}
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}
</urlset>

Front Matter

I can now add the following variables, all of which are optional, to the front matter of my posts and pages:

sitemap:
  lastmod: 2014-01-23
  priority: 0.7
  changefreq: 'monthly'
  exclude: 'yes'

As you can see, the changes I made are simple, but put together they make for a much more flexible implementation.

More Info: Visit the official sitemaps.org to learn more about the protocol.