category doesn’t appear on sitemap

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the categories not appearing in your sitemap. Thank you for raising this concern.

To ensure that your categories are included in the sitemap, please check the following:

1. Sitemap Settings: Go to Rank Math SEO → Sitemap Settings and make sure that the option to include categories is enabled.

2. Check for Custom Canonicals: If you have set custom canonical URLs for your categories, they may not appear in the sitemap. Ensure that you are using the default canonical settings provided by Rank Math.

3. Flush Permalinks: Since you’ve already tried this, just to reiterate, navigate to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress admin area and hit the “Save Changes” button to flush permalinks again.

4. Check robots.txt: Ensure that your robots.txt file is not blocking the category URLs. You can check this in Rank Math SEO → General Settings → robots.txt.

5. Plugin Conflicts: Sometimes, other plugins can conflict with Rank Math. You can use the Health Check plugin to identify any potential conflicts.

If you have checked all of these and the issue persists, we recommend replying to this ticket so a human agent from the Rank Math Support team can assist you further.

Thank you for your patience, and we hope to resolve this issue for you soon!

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

Hello,

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

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 filter/hook to your WordPress site:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Once done, please clear your website cache and see if that works for you.

Let us know how it goes. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Hello,

In this case, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress 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.