Sitemap – Parsing error Line 1

Hello,

Thank you for contacting the support and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

Sorry for the issue you are facing.

Assuming you are using the latest version of all the plugins and the themes (please update if not yet), it could a conflict with one of the plugins or the theme you are using.

To determine that, please follow this troubleshooting guide:
https://rankmath.com/kb/check-plugin-conflicts/

Please let us know if you find the culprit.

Only the site admin would know and your users won’t be affected by this troubleshooting.

Looking forward to helping you.

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

It sounds like you are serving a cached version of your sitemap to Google and your visitors.

You must add all the sitemap file locations to the exclusion list in your Cache plugin so that the sitemaps are never cached. These are the files you must add to the exclusion list:
sitemap_index.xml
post-sitemap.xml
page-sitemap.xml
category-sitemap.xml
product-sitemap.xml

This is required since Sitemaps are already cached internally by Rank Math and we flush them everytime you post something new and with our cache – you won’t see the issue you are seeing in Google.

If that doesn’t work, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please include your WP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.

Hi Joe,

It should.

Please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Hello Joe,

We are super happy that this resolved your issue. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.

If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.

If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.

Thank you.