Creating a sitemap for auditing your site

Suppose you're getting ready to migrate your website from Drupal 7 to 8, or maybe you just inherited a site. You'll want to do an audit to learn what content is on the site and how it is structured. When it comes time for a site audit, it’s good to start with a sitemap.

A sitemap is a list of the pages on a website. The sitemap may take many forms, from machine-readable XML, to an HTML listing of page names, to a text list of all the page URLs. For a content audit, both the HTML listing and the text list give you not only an excellent view of the content but a good idea of the structure of the site as well.

The quickest and most thorough way to build a sitemap is to generate it automatically. Several free tools on the web will do this for you. One of our favorites is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. It will generate a sitemap for sites up to 500 pages.

How to generate a sitemap

Navigate to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.
Enter the URL for your website. Note: If your site uses https instead of http, you’ll need to enter the ‘s’.
Click on the Start button to have it crawl the pages on your site. Once you click start, it will visit all the pages on your site, and make a list of all the URLs.

Download your sitemap

After a few minutes, or longer depending on the size of your site, it will produce a list of sitemaps in different formats for you to download. Once completed, click the View Sitemap Details button. Here you can view your XML or HTML sitemap.