Old and established sitemap plugin which does everything it should!

This is perhaps one of the oldest and most stable sitemap generators ever created, and I have been faithful to it for many years, deploying it on dozens of sites. It notifies Google and Bing automatically, and you can tweak the weights of your posts (to give more importance to what you wish to rank higher), as well as allow you to include non-WP links if you wish (I use that to post a common sitemap to web apps running under the same domain as one of my main sites).

The latest incarnation, 4.X, has had a code revamp. The first thing is that it now fully supports multisite installations (for some years I had to resort to a clone of that plugin, maintained separately, to have multisite functionality). It generates a robots.txt. It only notifies Google and Bing as soon as a new post/page/other content affecting sitemaps is added. And it works through the new WP Rewrite Engine, meaning that in theory you don’t need to add any external rewrite rules (on .htaccess, nginx’s rewrite rules, etc.), and there are no external files to maintain (sitemaps, robots.txt, etc.) — they’re now normal WP content and maintained at the database/WP level.

Support is excellent and blindingly fast on the support forums. Very well worth a donation!

The only reason for not giving it 5 stars is that the rewriting doesn’t always happen automatically as it should. Sometimes — depending on what plugins you have installed — it might indeed require external rules, and this might be tricky to track down. Compatibility with both Apache and nginx have been tested; it works with both.