To ensure Google and other search engines quickly discover and index all your newly migrated content, you must furnish them with a roadmap to your site. This roadmap is called an XML Sitemap.
In WordPress, you usually rely on a bulky SEO plugin to generate this map. In a ZeroPress static site architecture, this happens automatically at build time with absolute precision, complementing our robust ZeroPress SEO Setup.
The Role of the jekyll-sitemap Plugin
By default, every ZeroPress migration configures the official jekyll-sitemap plugin in your _config.yml file.
When you push your code to GitHub (or publish via the Sveltia CMS) and Cloudflare Pages begins building your site, this plugin quietly scans every single post, page, category, and tag index it generates.
It takes those URLs, calculates their last modification date (<lastmod>), and compiles them into a perfectly formatted, W3C-compliant sitemap.xml file.
Zero Server Load
Like everything else in a static site, this XML file is static. It gets generated once per update and is served via Cloudflare’s Edge Network instantly.
When Googlebot crawls your site, it downloads the sitemap without hitting a database query or triggering a PHP script, ensuring your crawl budget isn’t wasted on serving the roadmap itself.
How to Submit to Google Search Console
Once your site is live on your custom domain, follow these steps:
- Log in to Google Search Console.
- Add a Property for your new domain (e.g.,
https://www.yourdomain.com). This often requires verifying domain ownership via a DNS text record (which you can easily add in Cloudflare). - Once verified, click on Sitemaps in the left sidebar menu.
- Under “Add a new sitemap”, enter
sitemap.xml. - Click Submit.
Google will instantly read the map and schedule a crawl of all your beautifully fast, static pages.
Excluding Content from the Sitemap
Sometimes, you have pages you don’t want Google to find—like a specific “Thank You” page for a newsletter signup, or an internal style guide.
ZeroPress makes excluding pages trivial. In the front matter (the variables at the top) of the Markdown document you wish to hide, simply add sitemap: false.
---
layout: page
title: Internal Style Guide
sitemap: false
---
During the next build, the plugin will respect this flag, omitting the URL from sitemap.xml. Combine this with a standard robots.txt entry, and your private pages remain private.