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How to Create a Visual Sitemap in WordPress

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Ever wanted to display a visual sitemap in WordPress? A visual sitemap allows you to present a hierarchical layout of your different pages and sections. In this article, we will show you how to create a visual sitemap in WordPress without writing any code.

Adding a visual sitemap

Difference between HTML, XML, and Visual Sitemaps in WordPress

An XML sitemap is generated for machines and search engines. It uses XML markup language to represent the contents of your site.

Search engines can use these sitemaps to prioritize and adjust crawling rate for your website. See our guide on how to add an XML sitemap in WordPress.

On the other hand, a HTML sitemap is intended to be used by your website visitors (real people). It simply displays a list of your pages and different sections of your website on a single page. See our guide on how to add an HTML sitemap in WordPress.

While the HTML sitemap is great to show your site’s structure, sometimes it isn’t the ideal option to display the hierarchy of your website.

This is where a visual sitemap comes in handy. It allows you to show items, child-items, sibling items in a tree-like structure.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily add a visual sitemap in WordPress.

Adding Visual Sitemap in WordPress

To make it easy, we have created a video tutorial on how to visual sitemap that you can watch below.

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However if you just want to follow text-instructions, then you can follow our step by step tutorial on how to How to create a visual sitemap in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Slick Sitemap plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Now before you setup the plugin, you need to create a navigation menu in WordPress. Take a look at our beginner’s guide to learn how to add navigation menus in WordPress.

Using the WordPress navigation menus, you can create menus with sub-menus, and sub-menus can have their own sub-menu items.

Creating your visual sitemap with navigation menus in WordPress

This navigation menu will have all the pages or posts that you want to display in your visual map. You can name this menu Visual Sitemap and save it.

You can also create another menu or use an existing menu with just the few important pages. This menu will be used as the utility menu on top of your visual sitemap.

Once you have created the menus, it is time to setup your visual sitemap. Visit Settings » Slick Sitemap page to configure the plugin.

Slick sitemap settings

In the default sitemap menu option, you need to select your main visual sitemap menu. Choose the number of columns you want to be displayed.

Lastly, you need to choose the utility menu and click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Displaying Visual Sitemap on Your WordPress Site

Now that you have successfully created and setup a visual sitemap, the next step is to display the sitemap on a page in your WordPress site.

Simply create a new page in WordPress and add this shortcode in the content area.

[slick-sitemap]

After that click on the save or publish button to store your changes. You can now visit this page and see the visual sitemap in action.

Example of a visual sitemap in WordPress

We hope this article helped you add a visual sitemap in WordPress. You may also want to see our list of 25 most useful WordPress widgets for your site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

12 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
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  2. Clay Ravin says

    The Slick Sitemap plugin hasn’t been updated for 4 years. Is there an alternative we could use?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      While we don’t have a specific alternative to recommend at the moment, we will certainly keep an eye out :)

      Admin

  3. Trapti says

    I read both articles; xml sitemap & HTML sitemap. I already created xml sitemap in Google webmaster. Xml sitemap for crawling & HTML sitemap for users according to the article. So which sitemap should I put in my WordPress footer? I saw lot of websites put sitemap in WordPress footer.

  4. Hemang Rindani says

    Nice article. Sitemap is still important for a website and can help to boost the search results. WordPress, a powerful enterprise web content management service, allows users to create sitemap easily by implementing plugins like Simple Sitemap, as mentioned in the article. This can be implemented by implementing a shortcode on a post, page, custom post type or text widget. There are various attributes in this plugin that allows to set values for type of page, label, links etc..
    It is important to ensure that sitemap is updated each time any page or link in added or removed from a site. For this purpose I feel Google XML sitemap is a better plugin for WordPress sites.

  5. Matija says

    While it can look nice I dont see much benefits of this feature.

    Also you are recommending using plugin which is last updated 8 months ago.

  6. Bobby says

    Neat article. Just a couple of quick questions.

    Is there any really good reason to do an html sitemap on a page for your site? I don’t recall really seeing those anymore like I used to years ago.

    Is it better for larger websites? I only have approximately 20 pages total on my main navigation menu.

    Or would it simply be a personal choice for website layout?

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