Assistance Needed with 404 Error on Category Sitemap

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the 404 error on your category sitemap. Since you’ve already enabled the Category option, resaved permalinks, and cleared the cache, we recommend trying the following steps:

1. Flush Permalinks Again: Sometimes, it may require multiple attempts. Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress admin area and click Save Changes again, even if you haven’t made any changes.
   

2. Check for Plugin Conflicts: There might be a plugin conflict affecting the sitemap. You can use the Health Check plugin to troubleshoot this.

3. Ensure Your Posts Are Set to Index: If all your posts are set to noindex, it could lead to an empty sitemap. Go to Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta and ensure that the Index checkbox is enabled for your posts.
   

4. Check Sitemap Settings: Navigate to Rank Math SEO → Sitemap Settings and ensure that the category option is correctly configured.

5. Check Server Configuration: Sometimes server settings can block access to certain URLs. Ensure that there are no restrictions in your server configuration that might prevent access to the category sitemap.

If the issue persists after trying these steps, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will take over and assist you further.

Thank you for raising this concern!

Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

1. Please make sure that there’s an actual post associated with any category.

2. Head over to Rank Math → Titles & Meta → Categories and make sure that the robots meta is set to index. See screenshot below for your reference:

3. If you want to list all category pages despite being empty of posts, you may force to do that in Rank Math → Sitemap Settings → Categories and enable the option “Include Empty Terms”.

Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.

Hello,

Please follow the steps below:

1. Flush the Sitemap cache by following this video screencast:
https://i.rankmath.com/pipRDp

2. Exclude the Sitemap files of the Rank Math plugin in your caching plugin. The cache could be via a plugin or from the server. For plugins or Cloudflare, please follow this article:
https://rankmath.com/kb/exclude-sitemaps-from-caching/

3. Apply the following filter code to your site.

add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');

Here’s how you can add filter to your WordPress site:https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

If the issue persists, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

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.