Blank sitemap

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with your sitemap showing as blank or resulting in a page not found error. Here are some steps you can take to troubleshoot this issue:

1. Flush Permalinks

Sometimes, simply flushing the permalinks can resolve sitemap issues. To do this:

• Go to your WordPress admin area.
• Navigate to Settings → Permalinks.
• Click the Save Changes button without making any changes.

2. Check for Plugin Conflicts

If flushing permalinks does not work, there may be a conflict with another plugin or theme. You can use the Health Check plugin to identify any conflicts.

3. Check Source Code

If your sitemap is still blank, check the source code of the sitemap page. If it is empty, there might be a conflict with another plugin or theme. If there is data in the source code, consider flushing the sitemaps cache and ensuring it is excluded from caching plugins.

4. Rewrite Rules for Apache/Nginx

If you are using an Apache server, ensure that your .htaccess file has the correct rewrite rules. For Nginx, check your configuration file for the necessary rewrite rules as well. You can find more details on how to set these up in our Sitemap Issues article.

5. Validate Your Sitemap

You can also validate your sitemap using the Validate XML Sitemap tool to ensure it is correctly configured.

If you have tried all these steps and the issue persists, we recommend replying to this ticket with any additional details or errors you may have encountered, and a human agent from our support team will assist you further.

Thank you for raising this concern!

Sources:
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Troubleshooting the “Couldn’t Fetch” Error in Google Search Console » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us. We apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused.

Please try to follow the steps below and see if that works for you.

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. If the above steps don’t seem to work, kindly apply the following filter to your site.

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

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

Once done, clear your website cache, remove all the submitted sitemaps, and resubmit only the index sitemap in the Search Console.

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Thank you.