Creating a Dynamic Sitemap
This guide will help you create a dynamic /sitemap.xml page.
Requirements
This is an advanced tutorial. To follow it, you should be familiar with basic platformOS concepts, HTML, GraphQL queries, Liquid, topics in the Get Started section and topics related to Pages.
Steps
Creating a dynamic sitemap.xml is a two-step process:
Step 1: Prepare GraphQL query
Create a GraphQL query which fetches all pages except for the ones that are explicitly excluded via the proper metadata key:
app/graphql/sitemap_pages.graphql
query sitemap_pages($per_page: Int = 1000, $page: Int = 1) {
pages: admin_pages(
per_page: $per_page,
page: $page,
filter: {
metadata: {
has_key: "skip_sitemap"
exclude: true
}
}
) {
total_entries
total_pages
results {
slug
}
}
}
Step 2: Setup page
Use the GraphQL query defined above to iterate dynamically over all pages.
app/views/pages/sitemap.xml.liquid
---
layout: ""
static_cache:
expire: 3600
metadata:
skip_sitemap: true
---
Listing all pages from your system could take a long time, depending on the number of pages. It is a good practice to use some form of caching for pages that do not change frequently. This example uses static_cache to make this page much faster.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
{%- graphql g = 'sitemap_pages' -%}
{% for page in g.pages.results %}
{% if page.slug == '/' %}{% assign slug = page.slug %}{% else %}{% assign slug = '/' | append: page.slug %}{% endif %}
<url>
<loc>https://{{ context.location.host }}{{ slug }}</loc>
<changefreq>{{ page.metadata.sitemap.changefreq | default: 'monthly' }}</changefreq>
<priority>{{ page.metadata.sitemap.priority | default: 1 }}</priority>
</url>
{% endfor %}
</urlset>
Using this template, you can explicitly exclude any page from the sitemap.xml by including the skip_sitemap key to a metatag property of the page. You can also use metatag to configure any sitemap properties like changefreq and priority. Please note, that the example above already uses static caching for 1 hour - you might want to remove it for development.