SitemapGroup — Size & Limit¶
Wygard measures every sitemap your site declares and alerts you when one breaks the protocol's size or entry-count limits.
| Scope | Tier | Default | Alert |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site-wide | Basic | On — every sitemap declared in robots.txt |
🟠 Heads-up |
Why it matters¶
The sitemaps protocol caps each file at 50 MB and 50,000 URLs. Past either limit, search engines may stop reading the file partway — so the URLs at the bottom, often your newest pages, never get submitted. Sitemaps grow silently as a site does, and a generator rarely warns you when a file crosses the line; the first sign is usually pages that stay undiscovered far longer than they should.
The default severity is Heads-up — an oversized sitemap is worth planning a split for, not a same-hour fire.
What Wygard checks¶
On every run, for each sitemap and sitemap index, the crawler:
- Measures the file size and flags anything ≥ 50 MB.
- Counts the
<loc>entries and flags anything over 50,000. - For a sitemap index, it counts the child
<loc>entries. - For a sitemap, it counts
<loc>entries, excluding<image:loc>(image locations have their own limits). - Reports the result as a per-sitemap table:
| URL | Type | Size | Count of items | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| /sitemap-posts.xml | Sitemap | 4.1 MB | 12,340 | ok |
| /sitemap-products.xml | Sitemap | 61 MB | 74,900 | over limit |
Common alerts¶
- Sitemap over 50 MB — the file exceeds the byte-size cap.
- Sitemap over 50,000 URLs — the file has more
<loc>entries than the protocol allows.
Responding to an alert¶
- Open the alert and check which sitemap crossed which limit.
- Split the oversized file into several smaller sitemaps and reference them from a sitemap index — the standard fix for both the size and the count limit.
- Make sure the index (and its
Sitemap:reference inrobots.txt) points at the new files. - The next crawl re-measures each file and turns the test green.
Pair it with SitemapGroup — status code
Size & Limit checks that each sitemap is within bounds; the status code test checks that each one still responds. Together they keep the whole sitemap tree both reachable and readable.