Sitemaps Are Free SEO — Here's the Vite Plugin That Generates Yours

The Problem

Every static site I’ve shipped has gone through the same ritual: build the site, then manually write a sitemap.xml, forget to update it when a route changes, and discover a month later that Google indexed half my pages. Sitemaps are boring, so they get done wrong.

The Solution

@3ni8ma/vite-plugin-sitemap generates sitemap.xml (and robots.txt, if you want it) as part of your Vite build. You declare your routes once, and every build emits a fresh, correct sitemap.

// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import sitemap from '@3ni8ma/vite-plugin-sitemap'

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    sitemap({
      hostname: 'https://example.com',
      routes: ['/', '/about', '/projects', '/contact'],
      changefreq: 'monthly',
      priority: 0.7,
    }),
  ],
})

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That’s it. vite build now writes a sitemap into dist/ automatically.

Options Worth Knowing

Option Default What it does changefreq monthly Change frequency per URL priority 0.7 Crawl priority (0.0–1.0) lastmod now Last-modified date robotsTxt true Also generate robots.txt disallow [] Paths to disallow in robots.txt

The disallow option is the sleeper feature — point it at your admin routes and staging paths, and your robots.txt stays honest.

Why Bother

Sitemaps are the difference between search engines discovering your site in days versus weeks. For a static site, it’s one dependency and ten lines of config. The plugin is on npm, takes zero runtime dependencies, and runs entirely at build time.

If you ship static sites with Vite, this is five minutes that pays for itself in crawl coverage.