With Google’s capabilities, for sure, it can discover new content around the digital realm. Still, having a sitemap ready can greatly enhance website crawling. If you need help on terms such as crawling and indexing, refer to my post on: Understanding How Search Engines Work. To be honest, a sitemap will not 100% ensure that your entire website will be crawled and indexed. However, it won’t hurt having one.

child looking at a map

Sitemap is needed IF:

The website is huge. If you have a humungous site, there may be pages that are missed by the website crawlers.
Having many content that are orphan pages. What do I mean by orphaned pages? These are the pages are not linked together. You see, when a website crawler notices a link, it will scan all the links it sees. If a page does not contain a link, it will stop crawling. So, if you don’t specify on your sitemap, these pages without any links will never be discovered by search engines.
Your site is still new. Like a said earlier, a website crawler scans every link they see and it will continue the process until there are no links in a page. If your website is fairly new, there would be no links about it. Having a specific sitemap will tell these web crawlers that they should check this link.
Lastly, if you feature various multimedia content, then you should have a sitemap. Google looks for information about pictures and videos when searching for the latest news.

Sitemap is NOT necessary IF:

You only manage a “tiny” site. By tiny, it means that the website could have 500 web pages or even less.
The website is powered by Blogger, Wix, and other simple hosting services. Because if you signed up on these services, most propbably, there are already built-in pages and features, which includes a sitemap. So, no need for you to generate one for your small-scale website. To be sure, you can search your host’s help page and search for “sitemap.” Usually, it will give you a heads up if you need one or if it is automatically created for you.
Internal links are firmly established. If Google can find the integral pages of your website, then a sitemap is not needed. If from the main page Google can already locate other important pages, it’s all good.
Sitemaps are necessary in identifying multimedia files. So, if you don’t post any video content or image files, then, having a sitemap is not needed. If your website does not aim to appear in the “video” and “image” search results, don’t bother generating one.

What Are Sitemaps Anyway?

A sitemap, usually .XML in format, is a file wherein all the website’s contents are listed. It provides the necessary information about each important page in a website. This include information about images, videos, and other contents of the website. Major search engines refer to the sitemaps provided in order to understand a website more clearly. With a sitemap, Google can quickly locate the important pages of your website. To know more about sitemaps, please refer to this Search Console help page.