How to Generate a Sitemap in Laravel: A Complete Guide

Search engines like Google and Bing use sitemaps to discover and index your website's pages efficiently. If you're building a Laravel application, generating a sitemap is straightforward with the help of a popular package.

In this guide, you'll learn how to generate a sitemap in Laravel using the Spatie Sitemap package.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of URLs on your website. It helps search engines:

Discover new pages
Understand your site's structure
Index content faster
Improve SEO performance

A typical sitemap URL looks like:

https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:

Laravel 10, 11,12 or newer installed
Composer installed
A running Laravel application

Step 1: Install the Sitemap Package

We'll use the excellent package provided by Spatie.

Run the following command:

composer require spatie/laravel-sitemap

Step 2: Create a Controller for Sitemap Generation

php artisan make:controller GenerateSitemap

Step 3: Open the controller and add the following code.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Spatie\Sitemap\Sitemap;
use Spatie\Sitemap\Tags\Url;
use App\Models\Post;

class GenerateSitemap extends Controller
{
    public function index(){
        $sitemap = Sitemap::create();

        /*
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Static Pages
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------
        */
        $sitemap->add(
            Url::create('/')
                ->setPriority(1.0)
                ->setChangeFrequency(Url::CHANGE_FREQUENCY_DAILY)
        );

        /*
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------
         Posts
        --------------------------------------------------------------------------
        */
        Post::with('category')
            ->where('status', 1)
            ->latest()->get()
            ->each(function ($post) use ($sitemap) {
            $sitemap->add(
                Url::create($post?->category->slug .'/'. $post->slug)
                    ->setLastModificationDate($post->updated_at)
                    ->setPriority(0.9)
                    ->setChangeFrequency(Url::CHANGE_FREQUENCY_WEEKLY)
            );
        });        

        /*
        |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
        | Write File
        |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
        */
        $sitemap->writeToFile(public_path('sitemap.xml'));

        return back()->with('success', 'Sitemap Generated Successfully!');
    }
}

Step 4: Create a route to generate the sitemap.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::get('generate-sitemap', [GenerateSitemap::class, 'index']);

Step 5: Run command

php artisan serve

Step 6: Visit the sitemap URL to generate the sitemap.

http://127.0.0.1:8000/generate-sitemap

After visiting the sitemap generation URL, the sitemap file will be generated and saved in the public folder.

D:\laravel\mindwarezone\public\sitemap.xml

MWZ

Tutorials

Laravel