Sitemap issues

Hello,

We apologize for the issues you are facing with your sitemap pages. There are several common problems that can occur with sitemaps, and we can guide you through some potential fixes:

1. Blank or White Page: If your sitemap shows a blank page, check the source code. If the source code is empty, there may be a conflict with another plugin or theme. You can use the Health Check plugin to identify the conflict. If there is data in the source code, try flushing the sitemaps cache and excluding it from caching plugins.
   

2. 404 Error: If Google can’t access your sitemap, try flushing permalinks by going to the Permalinks page in your WordPress dashboard and clicking Save Changes.

3. Sitemap Blocked by robots.txt: Ensure there are no unintended rules in your robots.txt file that might be blocking access to your sitemap. You can check this in Rank Math SEO → General Settings → robots.txt.

4. Custom Canonicals: If you have added custom canonical URLs to your posts, they may not appear in the sitemap. Consider removing these custom canonicals to allow Rank Math to generate them correctly.

5. Unsupported File Format: Ensure your sitemap file has the correct XML header:

   Also, check that you are using straight quotes for XML attributes.

6. Server Configuration Issues: If your sitemap is not working on Apache or Nginx servers, you may need to add specific rewrite rules to your server configuration files. For example, for Apache, you would add rules to your .htaccess file, and for Nginx, you would modify the Nginx config file.

   • For Apache:

     # START of Rank Math Sitemap Rewrite Rules
     RewriteEngine On
     RewriteBase /
     RewriteRule ^sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L]
     RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]
     RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)?-?sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=$1 [L]
     # END of Rank Math Sitemap Rewrite Rules

   • For Nginx:

     # START Nginx Rewrites for Rank Math Sitemaps
     rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
     rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;
     rewrite ^/([a-z]+)?-sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=$1 last;
     # END Nginx Rewrites for Rank Math Sitemaps

For more detailed troubleshooting steps, you can refer to our guide on fixing sitemap issues.

If these suggestions do not resolve the issue, 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