Introduction
In this post, I’m going to share how to create a sitemap without a plugin.
I found cakephp3-sitemap plugin, but the installation by composer doesn’t work. (You can download manually, though.)
I’m not a big fan of using plugins, and also my project doesn’t have many Controllers and Views. So, I did it by myself.
The steps are exactly the same as when you create pages with CakePHP.
Create Layout, Controller, and View. That’s it!
I also confirmed that being able to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Hope this helps 🙂
Environment
| CakePHP | 3.6.10 |
| PHP | 7.1.19 |
Sample Data
I assume that the website has these pages.
| Top Page | https://example.com/ |
| Information Page | https://example.com/info |
| Contact Page | https://example.com/contact |
| Display data from Items table. (1, 2, 3 are item_id.) |
https://example.com/items/detail/1 |
| https://example.com/items/detail/2 | |
| https://example.com/items/detail/3 |
Controller
Create /src/Controller/SitemapsController.php
Layout
Create /src/Template/Layout/sitemap.ctp
View
Create /src/Template/Sitemaps/index.ctp
About Tags
| <loc> | Required | The page url. |
| <changefreq> | Optional | Update Frequency. Example: always, daily, yearly |
| <priority> | Optional | Valid values are from 0.0 to 1.0. |
For more details, please check here.
Route
Now, the url of this sitemap is “https://example.com/sitemaps/index”
Let’s change this to “https://example.com/sitemap.xml”
Open /config/routes.php, then add this code around line 57.
Let’s access https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
Were you able to generate the sitemap?
Submit
Finally, let’s submit the sitemap to Google Search Console.
Step1: Log in to Search Console and select your site.
Step2: Click “Sitemaps”
Step3 : Click the red “ADD/TEST SITEMAP” button.
Step4 : Type “sitemap.xml”, then click “Test” button.
If there’s no problem with the test, type “sitemap.xml” again, then click “Submit” button.
It’s all done!
