It might be worth you posting this on the Yoast SEO plugin support section – https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordpress-seo as they maybe able to provide more help.
However it sounds like you have both a Sitemap generating plugin and Yoast SEO plugin installed, or have had in the past?
If so, it would appear they both are trying to generate a sitemap for you, and are conflicting so you can simply switch off the sitemap functionality in yoasts plugin or remove the other sitemap plugin, then go and remove the sitemap.xml file on your server and get which ever plugin you choose to regenerate it.
Hope that makes sense, if you are in any doubt though, worth using that above link and asking the Yoast support peeps 🙂
Thanks. I’ve looked in server control panel and there’s a sitemap.backup.xml and a sitemap.xml.gz files. I did have a all in one SEO plugin, but it wasn’t active. Now deleted the plugin. Under the WordPress dashboard, settings, XML sitemap, there was a button to delete the old sitemap, which I pressed and it now states removed. Should I also delete the xml.gz file under the server control panel? Thanks, sorry if not up to speed.
You can remove the gz file, it’s a zipped version of the sitemap, but perhaps rather then deleting it, simply rename it through your server control panel, so you still have it as a backup. Then just use Yoast SEO plugin from now on and everything should be fine.
Thanks, just rechecked the server control panel and both files xml and xml.gz have changed to sitemap.backup, so looks like done automatically. Take it don’t need to manually press a button and rebuild the Yoast sitemap as done automatically, so all now done. Thanks for your help Tim, it’s appreciated.
