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How to Fix Yoast’s WordPress SEO Sitemap 404 Error

Last updated on April 13th, 2014 by Editorial Staff

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How to Fix Yoast’s WordPress SEO Sitemap 404 Error

Are you getting a 404 error when trying to view your sitemap? If you’re using Yoast SEO, this can happen. In this article, we’ll show you how to easily fix Yoast’s SEO sitemap 404 error.

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress, but sometimes it can conflict with other plugins or themes on your site.

One of our previous clients ran into the issue of getting a 404 error for their sitemaps generated by Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. After trying a few things, we were able to figure out the solution.

First thing you should try is open your .htaccess file. You can use a plugin like Htaccess File Editor to edit your htaccess file from your WordPress dashboard.

We recommend creating a backup of your WordPress site before making any changes, as even a small typo could bring down your website.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, go to Settings » WP Htaccess Editor. Make sure to read the instructions before you click the “I understand. Enable the editor” button.

enable the htaccess editor

After you enable the editor, simply add the following code in there, at the bottom:

# WordPress SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress SEO - XML Sitemap Rewrite Fix

For most people this fixed the issue. Someone reported that while this code fixed the issue, the page was still sending the 404 response header which meant that Google Webmasters tool couldn’t find it.

If that doesn’t fix the 404 sitemap issue, you may need to try another method. While not preferred, in our client’s case we had no choice but to edit the core plugin files to fix the issue. As suggested by hadjedj.vincent, we edited the class-sitemaps.php located in “/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/inc/class-sitemaps.php”.

You need to look at the function init() code and make that section look like this:

/**
	 * Initialize sitemaps. Add sitemap rewrite rules and query var
	 */
	function init() {
		global $wp_rewrite;
		$GLOBALS['wp']->add_query_var( 'sitemap' );
		$GLOBALS['wp']->add_query_var( 'sitemap_n' );
		add_rewrite_rule( 'sitemap_index.xml$', 'index.php?sitemap=1', 'top' );
		add_rewrite_rule( '([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$', 'index.php?sitemap=$matches[1]&sitemap_n=$matches[2]', 'top' );
		$wp_rewrite->flush_rules();
	}

Basically what we are doing is adding the global $wp_rewrite; before everything that is already there and adding flush_rules after the code. By adding this in the plugin, it fixed the sitemap 404 issue on our client’s website.

Some of our users reported that after applying the above fix, they still needed to uncheck the sitemap option in the Yoast’s SEO plugin and save their settings. After that re-checking the sitemap’s option fixed the error for them.

If you were looking for a fix for your sitemap 404 issue, we hope that this fix has helped you! You might also want to check out our comparison of Yoast SEO vs. AIOSEO.

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