Advanced Sitemap Plugin for Gatsby

We just shipped a new plugin that automatically generates advanced sitemaps for static sites built with Gatsby

In recent months we've been exploring using the JAMstack and building static sites for our own projects - it's been getting us really excited about the future of online publishing. Our journey began when we rebuilt the Ghost docs site from the ground up using Gatsby and Netlify, before rolling out Ghost on the JAMstack. This means you can use Ghost as a fully headless CMS, build a static front-end using a tool of your choice, and deploy it all with a speedy content delivery network.

One of the fun things about exploring new open source tech is that when functionality is missing, the best solution is to go ahead and build it yourself. That's why we decided to build an advanced sitemap plugin for Gatsby, which automatically generates organised sitemaps for any Gatsby site.

Effective SEO with automatic sitemaps

The default Gatsby sitemap plugin generates a simple blob of raw XML for all your pages. We wanted to take this one step further for our docs site and emulate the advanced sitemap structure that we use on all Ghost publications by default.

The advanced sitemap plugin adds more power to your site, by generating single or multiple sitemaps with full XSL templates to make them neatly organised and easy to read by humans or machines.

The plugin will also allow you to generate advanced, individually organised sitemaps based on your data with a small amount of additional configuration.

Once it's configured, your sitemap will always be up-to-date, ensuring your site content is being crawled and indexed for optimum SEO performance.

Installing the plugin 🔌

This plugin was built to work with any Gatsby project, whether you're using Ghost as a Headless CMS, or any other software to build your site. It's completely free and open source under the MIT licence.

Head to the Gatsby plugin library page to get started, or download the plugin directly from GitHub!