How to Find Your Squarespace Sitemap and How to Submit it to Google

You’ve officially decided to get started with SEO (and you’re figuring it out on your own), but you’ve been tasked with what feels impossible: finding your Squarespace sitemap to submit to search engines. 

First of all, YAY!! Taking the first step is usually the most difficult part, so you’re doing great just making it this far (don’t get overwhelmed!! It’s new, which is why it feels hard).

Second of all, here’s everything you need to know to learn how to find a Squarespace sitemap:

Pssst… if you haven’t done so yet, download this quick guide for six things you can do in 15-minutes that’ll help you improve your SEO!!

What is a Squarespace Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that provides information about all the pages, videos, and files on your website and the relationship between them.

You can have multiple sitemaps, for example, one for your products, one for your content, one for a sub-section of your content, but you have one CENTRAL sitemap, which is what we’re focusing on today.

Your Squarespace sitemap is just a sitemap for your specific Squarespace website. Sitemaps exist for all website builders—it just depends on whether they’re created manually or created by the builder itself.

Luckily, for Squarespace, your sitemap(s) are created when you build your website (or when you have a Squarespace designer set up your website). TL;DR: it exists if your website exists.

How to Find Your Squarespace Sitemap

Your Squarespace sitemap is: https://[yourwebsitenamehere].com/sitemap.xml

Simple, right? Squarespace makes it pretty easy for their users—even if you’re not necessarily super tech savvy. 

Your sitemap will automatically ignore (aka not include) hidden content, disabled pages, pages marked no-index, and password-protected spaces—it only includes pages publicly available and searchable.

If you want to edit your Squarespace sitemap, you’ll have to change the individual settings of the pages. For example, if you see a page that shouldn’t be publicly accessible on your sitemap, you’ll need to go to THAT page in your Squarespace backend and update its settings to “no-index” or set it as password-protected.

If you change your page settings, give your sitemap at least 24 hours to update, too.

How to Submit Your Squarespace Sitemap to Google

Technically, your Squarespace site may already be showing up in search results thanks to your built-in robots.txt file. Manually submitting your Squarespace sitemap to Google, though, ensures that your site is being read.

It’s also good practice to resubmit your sitemap if your site undergoes major updates or changes—whether they’re client-facing (design, copy) or behind-the-scenes (like updating your Squarespace metadata).

Whatever the reason, here’s how to submit your Squarespace sitemap to Google:

#1. Create a Google Search Console Account

Google Search Console is a tool used by Google to both track your site’s SEO performance on the platform AND submit your website and webpages for indexing—which is essentially what you’re doing when you submit your sitemap to Google.

Even if your main goal is to get found in all search engines (including the AI ones), Google Search Console is the best place to get started (and will make submitting your sitemap to Bing 100% easier).

If you already have a Google Search Console set up, skip down to Step #3. 

#2. Add and Verify Your Website

Once you’ve set up a Google Search Console account, you’ll need to add and verify your Squarespace website. Choose “Domain” setup. This should take you approximately 4-5 minutes.

Google Search Console will ask you to verify your ownership of the site. Follow the steps they provide! This can change depending on where your domain is hosted (not your website).

#3. Submit Your Squarespace Sitemap

Inside of your Google Search Console, navigate to your left side panel to “Indexing.” Under Indexing, you’ll see a section called “Sitemaps.” That’s where you want to go!

This is where you’ll submit your Squarespace sitemap. On the page, you’ll find a section that says “Add new sitemap.” 

Enter your sitemap URL / .xml where it says “enter sitemap URL.” Give it a few seconds (occasionally a few minutes) to register it, but double-check that in the section below, it says “success” under Status.

And voila, you’re done!

What Difference Does a Sitemap Have on Your SEO?

When it comes to SEO, your sitemap helps ensure that Google (and other search engines) know that your pages exist and how to navigate them (or rather, how they talk to each other). 

Not submitting your sitemap doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t rank on Google—but the same applies to submitting your sitemap; it’s not a guaranteed ticket to popping up first in search.

That being said, you’ll have a much harder time ranking without submitting a sitemap. 

Overall, submitting your sitemap should come at the end of your SEO journey, when you’ve updated your website for your keywords, figured out which pages you need to get found, and have started thinking about an ongoing strategy (like blogging, guest posting, podcasting).

Sounds like more than you bargained for? Let me take it off your hands! With the SEO Mini, you’ll get all your SEO foundations done for you for your base site (including your keyword strategy and submitting your sitemap for indexing when we’re done). Learn more here!