WordPress 5.5 Will Bring XML Sitemaps Functionality to Core

In WordPress 5.5, a new feature is being introduced that adds basic, extensible XML sitemaps functionality into the WordPress platform.

Key points:

• WordPress will expose a sitemap index at /wp-sitemap.xml. This is the main XML file that contains the listing of all the sitemap pages exposed by a WordPress site.
• The sitemap index can hold a maximum of 50000 sitemaps (but we all know why we should avoid that), and a single sitemap can hold a (filterable) maximum of 2000 entries.
• By default, sitemaps are created for all public and publicly queryable post types and taxonomies, as well as for author archives and of course the homepage of the site.
• The robots.txt file exposed by WordPress will reference the sitemap index so that it can be easily discovered by search engines.

There are a bunch of hooks available to modify the default behaviour. You might want to figure out if you want your SEO plugin or WordPress core to handle this for you before the release date which is set to August 11th, 2020.