How to create custom XML sitemaps in Shopify

Shopify XML Sitemap Limitations

One of the benefits/limitations of Shopify (depending on your perspective!) is that it automatically creates XML sitemaps split by page type.

However, for some more advanced SEO use cases this can be limiting since these sitemaps cannot be readily altered and new bespoke sitemaps cannot easily be created on the CMS (and subsequently uploaded to Search Console).

How to create a custom XML sitemap:

• Upload all URLs you want in your custom sitemap to Screaming Frog in List Mode and crawl.
• Create an XML file using the Sitemap option in Screaming Frog (if your URLs are canonicalised or no-indexed make sure to select the options to include them when creating your sitemap in Screaming Frog or they will not be in your export). If crawling old or staging URLs these will often be non-indexable so this is important!

Upload the XML file as a file in Shopify

• Upload your exported XML file to Shopify as a File – this will sit on the Shopify CDN. Note that it will give you a file URL - make sure to make a copy of this!

(This may seem counter-intuitive because you want to access your XML file as an XML sitemap, but this is the workaround required in order to do so.)

Create a redirect to point to your XML file

• Create a redirect from a new XML URL (Online Store>Navigation>URL Redirects>Create URL Redirect).

You cannot redirect from a URL that is still live so the redirect has to be from a URL that 404s.

Shopify returns a 404 for any URL that doesn’t currently exist so you can just make up any URL that isn’t currently live to use for your redirect.

For example, both the URLs below would result in a 404, and could therefore be used to redirect to your sitemap that’s hosted on the Shopify CDN:

example.com/example-url-that-i-made-up.xml

example.com/this-page-is-a-404.xml

When adding the redirect,  the first URL is on your domain, this can just be the relative URL, however, the URL you are redirecting to should be the absolute URL as this sits on the CDN.

Upload your redirected URL to Search Console

• Upload the redirecting sitemap URL to Search Console. (Index>Sitemaps>Submit Sitemap.)
• This will take a day or so to process, during which time the Status may appear as “Couldn’t Fetch”. However, soon after you should see “Success”. Google Search Console will follow the redirect you have in place to find your resolving XML sitemap file.

• About a week after this, you should be able to see an index coverage report for your sitemap.
• For old URLs, once they have been removed from Google's index, you should consider deleting the XML sitemap from Google Search Console to prevent Google repeatedly crawling old URLs without reason.

When to use a custom Shopify XML sitemap?

There are many potential reasons that you may want to bypass Shopify's automated XML sitemaps and create your own custom XML sitemap. Most of these revolve around getting Google to crawl old URLs to help process redirects. This can be helpful in the following situations:

1. If you migrate to Shopify and change URL structure, this could be used to help to process redirects and remove old URLs from the index.
2. If you consolidate sections of your site it can be useful to include old URLs in a sitemap to help Google process redirects that are in place and remove these URLs from their index.
3. This method could be used to upload hreflang sitemaps, (however, be careful as these would not be referenced in your robots.txt file by default and would have to be manually added).
4. If you have customised your Shopify CMS and have product variants that are not included by Shopify in sitemaps, this can be used to include them in a sitemap.

Can I add my custom Shopify sitemap in robots.txt?

By default your custom XML sitemap will not be included in the robots.txt file. However, now Shopify allows customisation of a robots.txt file you can add references to them into your robots.txt if you wanted to.

This would probably only be useful if your XML sitemap contains URL variants that are not included in the automated XML sitemaps due to customisation. Generally, there would not be much benefit in adding custom XML sitemaps which contain old URLs into the robots.txt file, adding into Google Search Console will do the required job.