How I mounted Yoast search engine marketing sitemaps on a large WordPress web page

one of my coated internet capabilities customers recently came to me with an issue: Yoast SEO sitemaps were damaged on their biggest, maximum-traffic WordPress website. Yoast SEO breaks your sitemap up into chunks. On this website, the individual chunks were loading, but the sitemap index (its "table of contents") would no longer load, and turned into giving a timeout error. This averted serps from discovering the particular person sitemap chunks.

Sitemaps are beneficial for featuring information to search engines concerning the content to your website, so fixing this subject was a excessive priority to the customer! They were annoyed, and confused, because this changed into working simply exceptional on their different sites.

given that this site has over a decade of content, I figured that Yoast SEO's dynamic generation of the sitemap changed into with no trouble taking too lengthy, and the server became giving up.

So I accelerated the web site's a number of timeout settings to a hundred and twenty seconds.

No good.

I multiplied the timeout settings to 300 seconds. five total minutes!

still no good.

This illustrates some of the problems that WordPress websites can face after they accumulate loads of content material: dynamic tactics birth to take longer. A method that takes a reasonable 5 seconds with 5,000 posts may take a hundred seconds with 500,000 posts. I might have finally made the Yoast search engine optimisation sitemap index work if I improved the timeout high adequate, however that wouldn't have been a superb answer.

it will have meant expanding the timeout settings irresponsibly high, leaving the server potentially open to abuse.

notwithstanding it is serps, not americans, who're asking for the sitemap, it is unreasonable to expect them to wait over 5 minutes for it to load. They're likely to surrender. They may even penalize the web site of their rankings for being sluggish.

I needed the sitemap to be reliably generated devoid of making the search engines like google wait.

When whatever thing intensive should take place reliably on a web page, look to the command line.

The answer

Yoast website positioning doesn't have WP-CLI (WordPress command line interface) commands, but that doesn't be counted — that you can just use wp eval to run arbitrary WordPress php code.

After a bit digging in the course of the Yoast web optimization code, I decided that this WP-CLI command would output the index sitemap:

wp eval ' $sm = new WPSEO_Sitemaps; $sm->build_root_map(); $sm->output(); '

That took an excellent while to run on the command line, but that doesn't depend, as a result of I just set a cron job to run it once a day and store its output to a static file.

0 3 * * * cd /srv/www/instance.com && /usr/local/bin/wp eval '$sm = new WPSEO_Sitemaps;$sm->build_root_map();$sm->output();' > /srv/www/illustration.com/wp-content material/uploads/sitemap_index.xml

The ultimate step that become needed turned into to regulate a rewrite in the web site's Nginx config that would make the /sitemap_index.xml direction point to the cron-created static file, as a substitute of resolving to Yoast website positioning's dynamic era URL.

place ~ ([^/]*)sitemap(.*).x(m|s)l$ rewrite ^/sitemap.xml$ /sitemap_index.xml everlasting; rewrite ^/([a-z]+)?-?sitemap.xsl$ /index.Hypertext Preprocessor?xsl=$1 closing; rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /wp-content/uploads/sitemap_index.xml last; rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 final;

Now the sitemap index loads immediately (because it's a static file), and is stored up to date with a authentic heritage process. The client is happy that they didn't need to switch search engine optimization plugins or installation a separate sitemap plugin. every little thing simply works, due to a little bit of command line magic.

What different WordPress processes would advantage from this form of method?

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Mark runs covered web capabilities which specializes in customized WordPress solutions with specializes in security, speed optimization, plugin building and customization, and complex migrations.

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