Thank you, really glad the new version feels more organized. I appreciate you taking the time to write this up.
Good questions, let me answer them directly one by one.
Do you need a new sitemap.xml?
No. Static Porter only crawls your posts, pages, categories, tags, and 404 page (whatever you’ve enabled under “Content to crawl”) — it never touches or generates sitemap.xml itself. Since there’s no static copy of your sitemap, the .htaccess rule finds nothing to serve and simply passes the request through to WordPress, so your existing sitemap (from Yoast, RankMath, or whichever SEO plugin you use) keeps generating itself dynamically and staying current, completely independent of Static Porter.
Does Asset Mirroring affect the sitemap?
No. Asset Mirroring only rewrites the src/href references inside your crawled static HTML pages, pointing them at locally mirrored copies of your CSS, JS, and images. It doesn’t modify your sitemap file, and the live image URLs your sitemap already lists keep working exactly as before on your WordPress server, whether or not mirroring is enabled.
General SEO recommendations:
The plugin’s main SEO benefit is indirect but real: faster page loads improve your Core Web Vitals, which is a direct Google ranking factor and you get that automatically just from running a crawl, no extra configuration needed. Two things worth checking on your end:
- Browse your site logged out (or in an incognito window) after a crawl, since that’s exactly what Googlebot sees and confirm nothing looks broken or missing compared to the logged-in view.
- Make sure anything duplicate, private, or irrelevant (like WooCommerce cart/checkout) is in your Excluded Paths, so it’s never accidentally served as a static page to crawlers.
This is genuinely useful feedback. I’ll add a proper SEO section to the FAQ so this is documented for everyone, not just in this thread. Thanks again for the thoughtful question.
