Subject: Urgent: Sitemap is not regenerating after major site changes

Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with your sitemap not updating after the changes made to your website. It sounds like you’ve already taken extensive troubleshooting steps, which is great.

Here are a few additional suggestions that might help resolve the issue:

1. Flush Permalinks: Sometimes, simply flushing the permalinks can help. Go to Settings → Permalinks in your WordPress admin area and click Save Changes without making any modifications. This can refresh the permalink structure and may trigger the sitemap to update.

   

2. Check for Plugin Conflicts: Since you are using multiple plugins, there might be a conflict affecting the sitemap generation. You can use the Health Check plugin to troubleshoot this by disabling all other plugins except Rank Math and checking if the sitemap updates.

3. Review Robots.txt: Ensure that your robots.txt file is not blocking access to your sitemap. You can check this in Rank Math SEO → General Settings → robots.txt.

4. Server Configuration: If you are using Nginx or Apache, ensure that the server configuration allows for dynamic sitemap generation. You may need to add specific rewrite rules as mentioned in our documentation for Apache or Nginx.

5. Check for Custom Canonicals: If you have set custom canonical URLs for any posts, they may not appear in the sitemap. Ensure that all posts have the correct canonical settings.

If these steps do not resolve the issue, we recommend replying to this ticket with your site URL and any additional details, and a human agent from our support team will take over and 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 the support and sorry for not following up quickly and any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

We checked the sitemap, and it works correctly.

We also tested them and found no issues there.

You can try disabling the transient cache for the sitemap. This will make sure that your XML sitemap always reflects the latest changes on your site. Kindly add this code snippet to your site:

/** 
 * Filter if XML sitemap transient cache is enabled.
 *
 * @param boolean $unsigned Enable cache or not, defaults to true
 */
add_filter( 'rank_math/sitemap/enable_caching', '__return_false');

If you’re not sure how to add this code, you can follow this guide: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/.

After you add the code, please clear any cache on your site or server and try removing and adding your main sitemap (sitemap_index.xml) to GSC.

Please note that Google can take some time to recrawl your sitemaps. You can monitor the “Last read/crawl date” column in the sitemap index as it will update the date when Google crawls your sitemap.

Also, please note that the ‘Discovered Pages’ on the Google Search Console only shows the number of pages that were discovered using the sitemap, and since the sitemap is not the only tool Google uses to discover pages, the number of ‘Discovered Pages’ might differ from your number of pages on your sitemap.

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

Thank you.