How To Bring Back Erased Sitemap In Yoast Easily-
Welcome to yet another incident in which I ran into a problem as a blogger.
My XML sitemap file got erased when I tried to troubleshoot my WordPress website.
What is a XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a text file with an XML extension that serves as a map of your website.
This map is for the search engine bots, such as Google bots. It helps them to crawl and index every essential page on your website.
It means that if I don’t have an XML sitemap for my website, crawlers cannot access the pages I want to index in search engine results pages(SERPS).
Now, what did I do that my XML sitemap file got erased from my website?
Why my XML Sitemap got erased?
My website was facing a lot of problems at the time. Therefore, I generated a report in Dev tools using lighthouse to figure out what was wrong.
According to the Lighthouse SEO report, the Google bot was unable to crawl my robot.txt file.
It said that my robot.txt file was invalid, preventing the bots from crawling and indexing my site.
To make it more clear, let me give you a brief note on it.
How are robots.txt and sitemap file related?
The robots.txt is a file in which you can include codes that allow bots to crawl your website.
From there, you can direct the bots to your XML sitemap file, where they can visit every single page on your site that you wish to be indexed.
Click on the link to learn more about robots.txt.
Coming back to the story. So, after I discovered the problem, I immediately assumed that there must be some code flaws to blame.
And due to this, the generated SEO report was showing such an issue.
I opened the robot.txt file and went over all of the code, but there was nothing wrong with it.
I double-checked to see whether I had “DISALLOWED” any search engine bots, but this was not the case.
Therefore, this leads me to my second possibility.
Second Possibility
My second possibility was plugins. Yes, plugins can frequently cause issues on your site.
The issues usually occur when they are not updated or when the latest version contains bugs.
To figure out what was wrong, I started to troubleshoot my WordPress website.
Normally, there are other approaches to troubleshoot a website, but I used this one.
In this technique, I deactivated each of my plugins one by one. Then I reviewed my site and generated a report to determine the root cause of the problem.
Here’s what I exactly did.
- I deactivated one plugin one at a time while keeping the other plugins active. This implies that only one plugin will remain deactivated every time.
- I deactivated the plugins one at a time and generated a report simultaneously then reactivated them all together.
Since I did not find the problem using the first step, I proceeded to troubleshoot my website using the second point.
But, regrettably, nothing of the preceding stages led me to a conclusion, and I felt as if I were at a dead end.
And exactly just at that moment, another issue occurred. It was regarding my Sitemap.
While troubleshooting my website, I deactivated my Yoast SEO Plugin, which erased my XML sitemap file.
So, how did I discover that my sitemap file was missing?
While debugging my website, I was constantly watching my sitemap, robot.txt file, and SEO report.
Therefore while checking out those files, I found out that troubleshooting had removed my XML sitemap file.
After my sitemap went missing, I had no idea how to recover it. And I couldn’t find the perfect solution that would work in my case.
Maybe, I wasn’t using the appropriate keyword or something since it took me a long time to discover the correct solution.
The ideal solution to my problem is a simple procedure. Here it is.
How to restore a erased sitemap file page in Yoast SEO.
Follow these simple steps to reclaim your Sitemap page.
- Navigate to Yoast SEO. Go to General->Features.
- You can find the XML sitemap file under the features section.
- Click the “OFF” button to disable your XML Sitemap file.
- Then, hover down and click “Save” to save the changes.
- If you have a Cache Plugin, utilise it to clear the cache memory. I used the SG Optimizer plugin to clean up my cache memory.
- Log out of your WordPress account.
- Wait a few seconds before logging into your WordPress account.
- Go to Yoast SEO. Select General-> Features-> XML Sitemap.
- Click “ON” to enable your XML sitemap.
- Click on “?” and then on “See the XML Sitemap.” Your Sitemap will be restored to its previous state.
Conclusion- Bring Back Erased Sitemap
Yes, this may not be the answer to your problem.
But I’d want you to try this easy technique to recover your deleted sitemap.
I hope this easy trick proved beneficial to you. Please share your opinions in the comments section below. Did it help you?
What’s next?
So, if you’re still wondering how I solved my problem, check out Robots Txt Invalid WHY? (My Panic Story P1).
You surely don’t want to miss it out. If nothing else, you’ll learn a little more from my blunders.