Your sitemap looks maintained

What this is

A sitemap is a list of every page on your site. It lives at an address like this:

https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml

Each page in that list can carry a date saying “this page last changed on this day.” The technical name is lastmod (short for “last modified”).

This check finds the newest date in the list and measures how long ago that was.

Why it matters to you

Robots come back more often to sites that change, and less often to sites that look frozen. The newest date in your sitemap is the quickest way for a robot to tell the difference. If it is two years old, the robot decides there is nothing new to come back for, and your future updates wait longer to be noticed.

This is a 4-point check. It is about being noticed on time, not about being trusted.

What we look for

We read your sitemap, find the newest lastmod date, and count the days since then.

• Pass: the newest date is 90 days old or less.
• Warn: the newest date is between 91 and 365 days old (you keep most of the points), or older than a year (you keep a few).
• Fail: there are no dates in the sitemap at all, so we cannot judge.

If you fail here, you almost certainly also missed Your sitemap has dates. Fix that one first and this one often fixes itself.

Whether you can fix this yourself

Yes, usually. On most platforms the sitemap rebuilds itself every time you publish or edit a page. If it looks stale, one of two things is true: you have not published anything in a while, or the dates are not updating when you do.

The honest fix for the first one is to update a page with something real: a corrected price, a fresh paragraph about a service. Do not change a date without changing the page. See A reader can see when the page was updated for why.

Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and SimplePractice all generate the sitemap for you. You cannot edit it directly, but publishing a real change usually refreshes it.

How to fix it

WordPress

1. If you use Yoast SEO or Rank Math, the sitemap updates on its own when you save a page. Open the sitemap in a browser and look at the dates.
2. If the dates look wrong or frozen, a caching plugin may be serving an old copy. Clear the cache and reload.
3. Then edit a real page and save it. Reload the sitemap and confirm today’s date shows.

Squarespace or Wix

Publish a real edit to any page. The sitemap rebuilds on publish. If dates still look old after a day, search your platform’s help for “sitemap” to confirm your plan includes one.

Shopify

Shopify rebuilds /sitemap.xml for you. Update a product or page and check the date the next day.

Your own site or a developer

Make sure the build regenerates the sitemap and that each <lastmod> is the file’s real edit date, not the build time. If every page shows today’s date on every build, robots learn to ignore the dates.

How to check it worked

Open https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml in a browser. Look for <lastmod> lines. The newest one should be recent. Then run the free check again.

Do not worry about

A sitemap with a few old pages is fine. Only the newest date counts here. Your “About” page from 2019 does not need a fake update.