Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
This plugin already states that it doesn’t work for posts, it’s there in the plugin description before you download it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/html-sitemap/ .
Can you explain why adding posts into a HTML sitemap is good for SEO reasons (please cite search engine resources)? A HTML sitemap is not the equivalent of an XML sitemap.
Andrew~ I absolutely don’t want to offend you here. I appreciate your commitment to WordPress, so I don’t want to come across as negative. However, I thought it should be brought to your attention that in fact, any good HTML Sitemap should have Posts embedded inside. I’m very aware that an HTML Sitemap is not an XML Sitemap.
Take a look at Yoast’s post about this very topic here. Why would someone with such professionalism, and experience in WordPress, add Posts to his Sitemap? I think the answer speaks for itself. Because if the purpose of an HTML Sitemap is to help Google and other search engines find your content, then why would you hold that information back? The question isn’t “why should I embed Posts”, but “why not”.
The simple truth is that most HTML Sitemaps are never visited by end-users. They’re for robots. Take a look at any Google Analytics report and you’ll see that no one is hanging out on your Sitemap Page.
I hope my answer is sufficient. Have an awesome week.
Bummer for the 1 star review. This plugin is pretty simple, you can look at the code and read the description as it explains it quite well, all I did was associate a shortcode with the wp_list_pages function. I’ve only added special code for the parameter ‘CURRENT’, which gets the current page ID. It took me longer to write the readme.txt.
For my use I use this plugin for a site (podcasting manual) that only contains pages. I made it specifically for listing children pages with a specific depth within the page. On sites where I used this plugin as a sitemap for the entire site I set the page so search engines do not index it. I already have a xml sitemap and all of my pages are linked with my theme’s navigation. The HTML sitemap in that case is a quick way to show web visitors the complete layout of the site. I’ve only used the HTML sitemap as a true HTML sitemap once, the power with this plugin is using it as a way to display lists of pages with parent/children navigation in mind.
I am sorry that my simple plugin does not solve your problem. I would however take a different tactic. I presume your rant was a way to manipulate me to add the function you needed. In the future I would recommend contacting the developer you want a feature for and kindly ask rather than question someone’s professionalism and experience.
