Description
This plugin prevents WordPress from adding its own sitemaps.
Also stops WordPress from adding a sitemap rule to the virtual robots.txt file.
👉 Uses only 1KB of code, so super lightweight, fast, and effective.
Features
- Lightweight — only one line of code
- Simple to use — activate and done
- No settings to worry about
- Easy peasy.
About WP Sitemaps
You can check your WP Sitemap located at /wp-sitemap.xml
Your sitemap should look similar to this.
For more information about WP Sitemaps:
Privacy
This plugin does not collect or store any user data. It does not set any cookies, and it does not connect to any third-party locations. Thus, this plugin does not affect user privacy in any way.
Disable WP Sitemaps is developed and maintained by Jeff Starr, 15-year WordPress developer and book author.
Support development
I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can make a donation or purchase one of my books:
- The Tao of WordPress
- Digging into WordPress
- .htaccess made easy
- WordPress Themes In Depth
- Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress
And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins:
- BBQ Pro — Blazing fast WordPress firewall
- Blackhole Pro — Automatically block bad bots
- Banhammer Pro — Monitor traffic and ban the bad guys
- GA Google Analytics Pro — Connect WordPress to Google Analytics
- Head Meta Pro — Ultimate Meta Tags for WordPress
- Simple Ajax Chat Pro — Unlimited chat rooms
- USP Pro — Unlimited front-end forms
Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thank you! 🙂
Installation
Installing the plugin
Activate like any other plugin and done. There are no settings, works automatically.
More info on installing WP plugins
Uninstalling
To uninstall/remove the plugin, visit the Plugins screen, deactivate and delete the plugin. This plugin makes no changes to the WP database.
FAQ
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Why is this useful?
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Because many sites add their own sitemaps via dedicated SEO plugins or custom code. So when WordPress adds its own sitemaps, there may be duplicate and/or conflicting sitemaps. Duplicate and conflicting sitemaps are discouraged as they may confuse the search engines. You don’t want to confuse the search engines, do you. Think SEO here.
So you have a choice. To avoid duplicate/conflicting sitemaps, you can either remove your existing sitemap solution, or you can activate this plugin to disable WP’s automatically generated sitemaps.
Or maybe you have a site that does not need sitemaps. Or maybe you just don’t want sitemaps, that’s your business pal. Whatever the reason, this plugin will do the job with a click.
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Got a question?
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Send any questions or feedback via my contact form
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Disable WP Sitemaps” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Disable WP Sitemaps” has been translated into 8 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Disable WP Sitemaps” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
If you like Disable WP Sitemaps, please take a moment to give a 5-star rating. It helps to keep the plugin going strong, and is greatly appreciated.
1.8.7 (2026/01/29)
- Improves readme.txt documentation
- Tests on PHP 8.4 and 8.5
- Tests on WordPress 6.9
Full changelog @ https://plugin-planet.com/wp/changelog/disable-wp-sitemaps.txt