How to Create an HTML Sitemap: From Organizing Content to Publishing and Updating

To create an HTML sitemap, start by identifying your website’s important pages, grouping them by topic and hierarchy, and presenting links to them on a standard HTML page. If you use a content management system (CMS), you can also generate one with a plugin. Once published, link to it from the header or footer and update it as your website’s content changes. The goal is to help visitors find content, not to cram every URL onto one page. An HTML sitemap also cannot replace an XML sitemap intended for search engines.

Plan navigation paths first—you do not need to list every page

An HTML sitemap can work like a book’s table of contents, showing the main categories first, followed by related subcategories or pages. Semrush’s guide describes it as a website directory: ideally, visitors should be able to find content through the existing menus, while the sitemap provides another place to browse it all.

You can choose and organize content according to the type of website:

• E-commerce websites: List product categories first so visitors can browse products within each category, rather than listing every product individually.
• Large content websites: Use top-level categories and subcategories to organize products, support resources, and information pages scattered across the site.
• Websites with fewer pages: Start by taking an inventory of all pages, then organize the links and hierarchy according to the site’s structure.

A 2026 Search Engine Journal report quoted Google staff explaining that HTML sitemaps can be organized around paths that are useful to users, rather than becoming enormous collections of links.

Choose manual creation or a CMS plugin based on your maintenance needs

Manual creation suits situations where you want direct control over the structure and design. First, organize your page list and categories. Then create a standard HTML page yourself or have a developer build it, linking each item to its corresponding page. An article marked as published in 2020 by Semrush gives small websites with no more than 100 pages as an example where manual creation may be worth considering. This is practical advice, not a page-count limit.

A CMS plugin can generate an HTML sitemap automatically. The same article demonstrates the process with a WordPress plugin: install the plugin, create a sitemap page, insert the block provided by the plugin, then save and publish. This was an example of the workflow at the time; it does not mean that every current version has the same interface.

The trade-off between the two approaches is control versus maintenance: a manually created page lets you arrange the layout yourself, but it also needs manual updates when the website’s pages change.

Provide a link after publishing, and update the sitemap when the structure changes

Once the sitemap is ready, you can link to it from the homepage footer to give visitors a consistent place to access it. If you later change categories, merge sections, or rearrange pages, update the manually created sitemap accordingly. A 2023 Yoast article specifically highlights this maintenance task.

Do not submit this HTML page as an XML sitemap. According to the 2026 report mentioned above, search engines can follow links in an HTML sitemap to discover pages, just as they do with links on other web pages. However, it lacks the strict structure of an XML sitemap and cannot be submitted and processed in the same way.