Sitemap error 2 (pls read previous ticket)

Hello,

We’re sorry to hear that you’re experiencing issues with your sitemap again. We understand the urgency of the situation and we’ll do our best to help you.

The error you’re encountering, “Error loading stylesheet: Parsing an XSLT stylesheet failed,” can be caused by various factors. To address this issue, we recommend following the steps outlined in our knowledge base article on fixing sitemap issues. You can find the article here.

If you’ve already tried these steps and are still facing issues, please ensure that your sitemap is correctly configured by using the Validate XML Sitemap tool. This will help confirm if there are any issues with the sitemap itself.

Additionally, it’s important to ensure that your sitemap is located in the root folder of your WordPress installation. If you manually created the sitemap, make sure it is installed in the root folder as shown in the article.

If all these steps have been followed and the issue persists, please check if your hosting package is providing enough resources for your site to run smoothly. You can do this by navigating to Tools → Site Health → Info from your WordPress dashboard and comparing the server requirements with what you have on your site.

If you’re still facing issues after following these steps, please reply to this ticket and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will assist you further.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we appreciate your patience as we work to resolve this issue for you.

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 and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

Please note that the sitemap generates on the fly in Rank Math, when you enable that module. We rely on redirects enabled by your server software to accomplish that. As the Sitemap doesn’t work in your case, you may have to add some rewrite rules to them in order to function sitemaps properly.

If you visit the /sitmeap_index.xml URI on your site and view the source code of your sitemap, you will be able to see that the XML sitemap itself is working and that’s why it is validating fine. But the linked XSL file /main-sitemap.xsl returns a 404 error. We can only access that with the direct URI that looks like this: /?xsl=main.

So the issue is basically that /?xsl=main should be rewritten to /main-sitemap.xsl (the rewrite pattern looks like this: /([a-z]+)?-?sitemap\.xsl$/' => '?xsl=$1).

This issue is related to your server configuration. We suggest you get in touch with your hosting provider for this issue.

Once done, please try to follow the steps below to clear your sitemap cache 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/

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

Thank you.