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By default, All in One SEO has always dynamically generated sitemaps rather than output them as a file on your web server.
What is a Dynamically Generated Sitemap?
Dynamically generated just means that instead of a physical file being created on the server, the content is displayed in the browser when someone goes to the URL.
This is very common when working with Content Management Systems such as WordPress. Every page of content that WordPress outputs is dynamically generated from content in the WordPress database. This is inherently better than creating static web page files like web developers used to 20 years ago.
Why Use a Dynamically Generated Sitemap?
There are four reasons why we do this, these are:
- Dynamically generating a sitemap means it’s created every time it is requested meaning it’s always up to date and accurately reflects the state of your site at that moment in time
- Dynamically generating a sitemap is usually faster and requires less resources than writing to a static file. Search engines care about how long it takes to access your sitemap, so using a dynamically generated sitemap is much better and avoids them giving up when it takes too long to read
- A static file can be overwritten or deleted, or become corrupt or inaccessible due to server permissions issues. A dynamically generated sitemap doesn’t have these problems
- Writing to a static file is a complicated process, it requires a lot of code to accommodate different server configurations and can be prone to bugs and conflicts. Generating a dynamic sitemap is a natural part of how WordPress works so is more reliable.
How to Check if My Sitemap is Dynamically Generated?
If you want to check whether your XML Sitemap is dynamically generated, go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps and click on the Open Sitemap button.
Next, right-click any where on the XML Sitemap and select View Page Source. You should see a green line at the top that says “This sitemap was dynamically generated”.
If you want to check whether your Video Sitemap is dynamically generated, go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps » Video Sitemap and click on the Open Video Sitemap button.
Next, right-click any where on the Video Sitemap and select View Page Source. You should see a green line at the top that says “This sitemap was dynamically generated”.
NOTE:
The Dynamically Generate setting has been removed in All in One SEO version 4.0 as the plugin now dynamically generates all the sitemaps by default.
Is There a Physical Sitemap File on my Server?
No, All in One SEO does not create a physical file for your sitemap.
Our sitemaps are all virtual web pages that are dynamically generated whenever a crawler visits the sitemap URL as explained above. This way it’s always up-to-date, there’s never an issue with it getting accidentally deleted, and you don’t have to worry about server-side file permissions making it unavailable to search engines.
