How to configure nginx for Yoast SEO sitemaps
If you’ve been following my WordPress fast stack guides, you’ll know I’m a big fan of nginx for the speed and scalability it provides. Some of you asked how to configure nginx with that stack guide to work with Yoast SEO sitemaps. The guide below covers our stacks, but will also work for any nginx users.
Since WordPress 5.5 (2020), core generates its own XML sitemaps at /wp-sitemap.xml. Yoast SEO switches those off and serves its own at /sitemap_index.xml, which is why nginx needs the rewrite rules below to route the pretty URLs through to Yoast.
Add the Yoast sitemap rewrite rules to your sites-available config file
With our rocket stack guide, the nginx file you need to edit will be:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/rocketstack.conf
So – either edit that file through FileZilla, or log into your server using SSH and run the following:
vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/rocketstack.conf
nginx does not read .htaccess files, so any pretty-permalink rewrite that Apache would handle automatically has to be declared in your server config instead. That is why Yoast sitemaps 404 on nginx until you add the rules below.
The only thing that really matters in terms of where to place the following code is to make sure it goes inside your server { … } blocks. With our guide there are two of these, one for HTTP and one for HTTPS, so you’ll need to paste this code twice.
# Rewrites for Yoast SEO XML Sitemap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;
location ~ ([^/]*)sitemap(.*).x(m|s)l$ {
## this rewrites sitemap.xml to /sitemap_index.xml
rewrite ^/sitemap.xml$ /sitemap_index.xml permanent;
## this makes the XML sitemaps work
rewrite ^/([a-z]+)?-?sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=$1 last;
rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;
## The following lines are optional for the premium extensions
## News SEO
rewrite ^/news-sitemap.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=wpseo_news last;
## Local SEO
rewrite ^/locations.kml$ /index.php?sitemap=wpseo_local_kml last;
rewrite ^/geo-sitemap.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=wpseo_local last;
## Video SEO
rewrite ^/video-sitemap.xsl$ /index.php?xsl=video last;
}Once you’ve edited the file, save it, then exit your editor.
Test for errors then restart nginx
On your server (putty, ssh etc), run the following command to double check you didn’t break your nginx config before you restart:
nginx -t
Once it has confirmed the file is ok, you can restart nginx using:
service nginx restart
Test your sitemap
From your wp-admin, visit SEO->General->Features tab then scroll to the sitemap and click the (i) button. It’ll tell you the URL for your sitemap.
Alternatively, just visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.
A tidier way to do this
I’ve added an extra Yoast-specific snippet to our Rocket Stack github repo. So, another way to do this would be to download those snippets and then have just this line inside both your server blocks:
include snippets/yoast-sitemaps.xml
You can find instructions to downloading our repo in our full WordPress Rocket Stack guide.
Summary
If you are using other sitemap plugins, there should be nginx-specific instructions that come with it to tell your web-server how to rewrite the pretty permalinks to feed the correct parameters to your sitemap generation plugin.
In the guide above, I’ve shown how to do this for Yoast specifically, but similar steps will work for all sitemap plugins.
If you’d rather not maintain nginx rewrite rules for sitemaps at all, our own Super Speedy Sitemaps plugin generates ultra-fast XML sitemaps and is built for large WooCommerce and WordPress sites where the standard sitemap generators struggle.
Will this work with subdirectory sites? meaning, example.com/subdirectory