The short version: for XML sitemaps (the ones search engines read) use Yoast or Rank Math if you're on WordPress, or the free generator at XML-sitemaps.com for anything else. For visual site maps (the ones humans read to plan or redesign a site) use Octopus.do's free plan or Screaming Frog's free crawler, which caps at 500 URLs but tells you more truth about your site than any pretty diagram will. None of these tools will fix a badly built site. They just show you the mess more clearly.
I got caught out by this last year. I hadn't touched the back end of my own site in about four years because I was, frankly, too busy putting out fires elsewhere in the business. When I finally sat down and ran a crawl, I found 340 orphaned pages, blog posts from 2018 and 2019 that no menu, no internal link, nothing pointed to anymore. Google still had some of them indexed. A few were even ranking, quietly, for keywords I'd forgotten I'd ever targeted. That's the kind of thing a free mapping tool finds in about eleven minutes. It's also the kind of thing you only find if you run one, not just install a plugin and forget it.
So let's go through what these tools do, which ones are worth your time, and where the free versions stop being useful.
Two completely different things called "sitemaps"
This trips up almost everyone, including people who've been doing marketing for years. There are two totally different tools people mean when they say "sitemap":
- XML sitemaps: a plain file (usually sitemap.xml) that lists every URL on your site so search engines can find and crawl your pages more efficiently. Nobody but Googlebot, Bingbot, and the odd developer ever looks at this file directly.
- Visual sitemaps: a diagram, usually a box-and-line chart, showing how pages relate to each other. Used for planning a new site, redesigning navigation, or briefing a designer or developer.
If someone asks you for "the sitemap" before a redesign, they almost always mean the visual one. If a developer mentions "the sitemap" while talking about SEO, they mean the XML one. Get this wrong and you'll spend an afternoon showing a client a plain text file full of URLs when they wanted a diagram, which is exactly what happened to me in a client meeting in 2022. Slightly awkward. Completely avoidable once you know the distinction.
Free tools for XML sitemaps (the ones for search engines)
These matter for one specific job: helping search engines discover and crawl your pages. That's it. An XML sitemap does not directly help you rank higher. It helps Google find pages faster, particularly on big sites or new sites with few internal links pointing to key pages. If your site is small and well linked internally, Google will find your pages with or without one.
- Yoast SEO (WordPress plugin, free tier): generates and updates your XML sitemap automatically. Find it at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml once it's active. Zero configuration needed for most sites.
- Rank Math (WordPress plugin, free tier): does the same job as Yoast, slightly more granular control over which post types get included, and I've found it a touch faster on larger sites.
- XML-sitemaps.com: the go-to for non-WordPress sites. Free version crawls up to 500 pages, generates the file, and you upload it manually to your server. Fine for small business sites. Painful if you're doing this weekly, because you have to redo it every time.
- Google Search Console: not a generator, but it's where you submit and check your sitemap once it exists. Go to Sitemaps under Indexing, paste the URL of your sitemap file, and it'll tell you how many pages were discovered versus how many got indexed. This gap is often the most useful number on the whole report; if you submit 400 pages and only 210 get indexed, something's wrong with either quality or duplication.
Free tools for visual site maps (the ones for humans)
This is the diagram you'd take into a meeting with a web designer, or use to plan a redesign before a single page of copy gets written. Skipping this step is the single most common reason website redesigns run over budget: nobody agreed the structure before the visual design started, so half the pages get rebuilt twice.
- Octopus.do: free plan lets you build one site map with unlimited pages, drag and drop boxes, add notes per page, share a link with a client for comment. This is what I use now for client planning sessions because it's quick to demo live on a call.
- Slickplan: free trial (not permanently free, worth flagging) with a nice drag-and-drop interface and templates for common site structures like ecommerce or SaaS.
- WriteMaps: free tier caps at a small number of pages per map, but the export to PDF is clean and clients understand it instantly without explanation.
- GlooMaps: free plan, decent for simple sites, less polished than the others but does the job for a five-page brochure site.
- A plain spreadsheet: I'll say this plainly because nobody else will. For most small business sites under 30 pages, a Google Sheet with columns for URL, page title, parent page, and status does everything a fancy sitemap tool does, and it's easier to edit collaboratively than any of the visual tools above. Don't feel you need software for a site with twelve pages.
The tool that finds the truth: crawlers
Here's the bit most articles on this topic skip entirely. Neither an XML sitemap generator nor a visual site map builder tells you what's wrong with your site. They both assume you already know your site's structure. A crawler doesn't assume anything. It goes and looks.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, free version, is the tool for this. It crawls your site like a search engine would, up to 500 URLs on the free tier, and gives you every page's title, meta description, response code, redirect chain, word count, and internal link count in one spreadsheet-style view. Here's exactly what I did with my own site, step by step, when I ran that audit I mentioned earlier:
- Downloaded Screaming Frog free, entered my domain, hit start.
- Waited about six minutes for it to crawl roughly 480 pages (right against the free cap, which told me I needed the paid version for the full picture, and I bought it that afternoon for £199 a year).
- Sorted the "Inlinks" column ascending to find pages with zero or one internal link pointing to them. That's how I found the 340 orphans.
- Checked the "Response Codes" tab and found 23 pages returning 404s that were still linked from elsewhere on the site, mostly old resource pages I'd deleted without updating the links.
- Found four redirect chains of three hops or more, meaning a visitor (and Googlebot) had to follow three separate redirects to reach the final page. Google's own guidance says to avoid redirect chains where possible because each hop adds crawl budget cost and can dilute link value.
None of that came from a sitemap generator or a pretty diagram. It came from crawling the site and reading what came back. That's the uncomfortable truth about "sitemap tools" as a category: the visual ones make you feel organised without necessarily making your site better, and the XML ones just tell search engines where to look, not whether what they find is any good. The crawler is the only one that tells you the truth, and it's also the least glamorous of the three.
When free stops being enough
The 500-URL cap on Screaming Frog's free version and most other free crawlers is not arbitrary. It's roughly where a small business brochure site or blog ends and a proper content site, ecommerce store, or multi-location business site begins. If your sitemap.xml file (check yoursite.com/sitemap.xml right now) lists more than around 400 to 500 URLs, you've outgrown the free tools and you're working with partial data every time you run one.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
The other point where free tools stop being enough is when the problem isn't the tool, it's the decision-making. A sitemap, visual or XML, tells you what exists. It doesn't tell you what should exist, which pages should be merged, which categories are cannibalising each other in search results, or how to restructure navigation without breaking 200 existing backlinks. That's judgment, not software, and it's the actual reason businesses bring in outside help for this rather than just running another tool. If you're weighing up whether that kind of hands-on AI and site audit help is worth the spend versus muddling through with free tools alone, the honest answer depends on how many pages you're carrying and how much revenue sits behind the ones that are broken.
A quick checklist for doing this
- Check whether your XML sitemap exists: visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
- Submit it in Google Search Console if it isn't already listed, and check the discovered versus indexed gap.
- Run a free crawl with Screaming Frog to find orphaned pages, broken links, and redirect chains.
- If you're planning a redesign, build a visual site map in Octopus.do or a spreadsheet before any design work starts.
- Re-crawl every quarter, not once and forget it. Sites rot quietly; nobody notices until traffic drops.
Related reading: 16 Not To Miss Points Checklist When Building E-commerce Website.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an XML sitemap if my site is small?
Probably not strictly, but it costs nothing to generate one and it removes any doubt about whether Google can find every page. If your site is under 20 pages and well linked internally, an XML sitemap is a nice-to-have rather than essential.
Will a sitemap tool improve my Google rankings directly?
No. An XML sitemap helps search engines discover your pages faster, particularly on larger or newer sites, but it has no direct effect on ranking position. Content quality, internal linking, and backlinks do that work, not the sitemap file itself.
What's the best completely free tool for a small business site map?
Octopus.do's free plan for the visual diagram, and Screaming Frog's free crawler (500 URL limit) for finding what's broken. Together they cover both jobs without spending anything.
How often should I re-run a site crawl or update my sitemap?
Every three months for an active site, or immediately after any redesign, big content push, or page deletion. Sites accumulate broken links and orphaned pages quietly over time, and the only way to catch it is to check.
Related reading: The Best AI Productivity Tools for Entrepreneurs in 2026 (What I Use, Daily) and The Best AI Tools for Small Business Owners (What I Pay For).
