We'll create fresh WordPress site with Sitemap Generator Professional installed. You have 20 minutes to test the plugin after that site we'll be deleted.
The Sitemap Generator uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once.
If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this plugin, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most WordPress users do), it would be wise to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap.
It’s no longer possible to purchase tokens for the Sitemap Generator as of mid-January 2023.
The service is still available for all users that have already purchased a token and will be shutdown when the last issued token expires mid-January 2024.
Please note that the Sitemap Generator plugin requires a paid token to operate. The free version is no longer offered.
I have published a detailed document about how the Sitemap Generator aggregates the data for the generation of sitemaps and which file types are getting indexed on my website.
The Sitemap Generator Professional is a paid plugin. A free version was offered for many years, but since August 2022 only a paid version is available.
Sitemap Generator Professional
If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your WordPress root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine.
If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the plugin, you could use the Online Sitemap Generator on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps.
The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.