What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file, usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, that lists the URL of every page on a website along with when each page last changed. Search engines read it to discover pages instead of finding them only by following links, which matters most for pages nothing links to yet.
Why it matters to a shop
Your newest pages are the ones a search engine is least likely to find on its own — a menu page you added last week, a service page reachable only from a dropdown, a branch page nothing links to. Until a page is crawled it cannot appear in results at all, and you have no way to tell whether the problem is the page or the discovery. A sitemap removes that question: it hands a search engine the whole list, instead of leaving discovery to whatever happens to link to what.
How to check and submit yours
- Publish first. A sitemap describes a live site, so there is nothing to check until you have a published address. Open that address with /sitemap.xml added to the end.
- Read what comes back. You should see a plain list of page addresses — home, contact, each service or menu page. If a page you expect is missing, or a page you deleted is still listed, fix the site and publish again before doing anything else.
- Submit the address once. Create a free Google Search Console account, verify that you own the site, and paste the sitemap address into its Sitemaps section. Do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools if you want. You do not resubmit after every edit.
Common mistake: Submitting a sitemap does not make pages rank, and it does not make them appear quickly. It only tells a search engine those pages exist.