More and more people understand the value of the sitemap and add it to Search Console to help the tool better explore the content of a website or blog. I often find this to be the case when working as a webmaster on a wide variety of web media. However, I’ve noticed how time-consuming it can be to find out where and how to delete a sitemap. Because adding a sitemap is fairly straightforward. On the other hand, to delete one or more, you still need to find the little icon that will let you do it!
So let’s find out where this little icon is hidden ! 🙂
Where do I click to delete a sitemap on Search Console?
You have migrated your website or entrusted this work to a Service Provider and you would like to modify your sitemap(s) following this migration ? In particular because the path to finding the sitemap has changed ? Whatever your reasons for wanting to delete a sitemap, you should know that it will be preferable to replace it with another one (or several others). In order to help Search Console become familiar with the content of your website. To better explore the content, detect it and potentially index the urls.
So go to your Search Console via this address :
Then go to the menus on the left and look for the menu : Indexing. Once you see this menu, click on the submenu named: Sitemaps.
On this page, you will see 2 parts:
- The “Add a sitemap” section: This allows you to paste the path to your sitemap(s), which you add one by one.
- The “Sent Sitemaps” section: This lists the sitemaps already submitted to Search Console for reading.
To delete a sitemap, it’s the second part that interests us. If you want to delete one, then you probably already know this area anyway. In this case, here’s what I have on a small website for which I want to remove two sitemaps that I no longer need :
To access the sitemap in question, the second in the screenshot above, click on its title, “featured_items-sitemap.xml“. This takes me to the relevant sitemap page:
In the screenshot above, you can’t immediately see how to delete the sitemap. And that’s surely part of the problem.
So rather than leaving you to search, you should know that to obtain the option/link that will allow you to delete a sitemap, you need to look at the top right-hand corner of the screen. You will see the heading: OPEN SITEMAP. And just to the right of this heading, you will see a vertical icon with three small dots as shown below in the screenshot:
So it’s this icon with the three little dots that you need to click on to delete a sitemap. Here’s what you’ll see after one click:
It will display the message : “Delete sitemap”. You know now where you must click to delete your sitemap on Google Search Console.
Next, a small window will ask you to confirm whether or not you want to delete your sitemap. 🙂
Why delete a sitemap?
In the example used for this short tutorial, the sitemaps related to the WordPress theme installed on the blog concerned. It added post formats that were ultimately unused. Since these post formats contained no content or articles, there was no reason to keep this sitemap in Search Console.
In reality, there are several reasons for deleting sitemaps. This will depend on certain plugins or even certain WordPress templates/themes which, when changed, no longer offer any content via particular formats or blocks… This is common with certain builders. The same applies when, for example, you add a portfolio and then change the tool used to display it. 🙂
The same applies if you change platforms and the previous platform offered a different path for the sitemap. After website transfers and/or blog migrations…)
On the other hand, it is better not to delete one or more sitemaps unless you are certain that they are empty or have been completely useless for a long time. A sitemap must no longer contain any content before it can be removed. 🙂
By the way, if you click on the Search Console Sitemaps submenu for help, you’ll see the following :
“What is a sitemap? Do I need this report? A sitemap is a file on your site that tells Google which pages of your site we need to know about.
So it’s easy to see why it’s important to have one or more sitemaps!
In short, in terms of webmastering, or almost in terms of SEO, the sitemap is one of those very useful little elements (and it’s free) that help Google to better discover and understand the content of a website/blog. This can contribute to the proper indexing of certain URLs.
