Multipe Sitemaps after Yoast Professional Tuning

Your main sitemap (https://www.garageflooringllc.com/sitemap_index.xml) is the standard Yoast sitemap index. If you open any of those 5 links, you’ll find a second level of pages/posts/categories/tags for indexing. For example:
https://www.garageflooringllc.com/page-sitemap.xml contains all your site pages; https://www.garageflooringllc.com/post-sitemap.xml includes all your blog posts.

Regarding the second sitemap, that looks to be generated by another plugin: google sitemap generator. If you are happy with the YOAST sitemap (it looks absolutely fine to me) then you should deactivate/delete the additional plugin as duplicate sitemaps are a bad idea.

Finally, I would contact YOAST directly regarding any paid services, as the forum here is mostly community supported.

@garageflooringllc

I would turnoff the Yoast Sitemap function – or seeing as you paid them to “tune” your site tell them to do so, and at the same time disable the admin nag messages you will get from Yoast SEO when using another sitemap plugin!

It looks to me like you are using “WP Fastest Cache” for caching. This plugin preloads the HTML static page cache based on the links in your sitemap, and doesn’t work properly with multiple sitemaps.

Other caching plugins including W3TC and WP Super Cache also use the sitemap to preload the cache, and these also don’t work properly with multiple sitemaps

It’s very important to cache WordPress pages/Posts to get best Google page load speeds, and the best way is to preload the cached files instead of waiting for someone to view the page before generating a fresh cached version. I’m really surprised Yoast has not taken this into account with their plugin and their “SEO” guidlines.

It really makes no sense to use a sitemap_index.xml file and multiple sitemaps for a website with under 50 000 pages – there’s no need.

@mikeotgaar

Other caching plugins including W3TC and WP Super Cache also use the sitemap to preload the cache, and these also don’t work properly with multiple sitemaps

I use the sitemap function of this plugin with SuperCache and the preload enabled. I haven’t experienced any issues or flags from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you be more specific about how these caching plugins using preload function might be negatively impacted by Yoast SEO’s sitemap_index.xml ?

Hi,

It says…

“This XML Sitemap Index file contains 18 sitemaps.”

However, when I look in the main ftp route I can’t see them?

Thanks

@rik0399

The sitemaps cannot be found physically in the root of site as per other sitemap plugins. They are generated dynamically when the url is called. If you visit ‘www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.php’ and you can see the sitemap(s) then there is nothing to worry about, although you should always monitor your google webmaster tools account for the site to make sure that Google is happy.

Hi barnez,

Thanks for that, understood, I thought a physical file needs to be present in the root.

Many Thanks ??