Sitemap Monitoring

Validates your XML sitemap for correctness and monitors it for changes. A well-maintained sitemap helps search engines discover and index your content efficiently.

How It Works

Hoppla fetches and parses your sitemap.xml, checking its structure against the Sitemaps XML protocol. It validates the XML syntax, verifies that listed URLs are accessible, and tracks changes over time.

What Hoppla Checks

• XML validity -- Well-formed XML that conforms to the sitemap schema
• URL accessibility (sampled) -- A sample of the listed URLs is checked for a successful HTTP status
• URL count -- Total number of URLs across all discovered sitemaps
• Sitemap index support -- Follows sitemap index files to validate child sitemaps

Sitemap discovery

Hoppla discovers which sitemap(s) to check in this order:

1. The explicit sitemap_url setting, if provided
2. Otherwise, any Sitemap: directives found in the site's robots.txt
3. Otherwise, the default {monitor_url}/sitemap.xml

Configuration

Setting	Description	Default
Sitemap URL (sitemap_url)	Explicit sitemap URL (overrides discovery)	(discovered)
Sample size (sample_size)	How many URLs to sample for reachability (1–100)	20
Check interval	How often to validate the sitemap	24 hours

URL reachability is sampled, not exhaustive: Hoppla checks up to sample_size URLs, five at a time, within 30 seconds per run. On a very slow site fewer may be checked; the result's Sample size shows how many were. A warning is raised only when more than 20% of the sampled URLs are unreachable.

Results

Field	Description
Total URLs (total_urls)	Total number of URLs found across all sitemaps (capped at 5000)
Sitemaps found (sitemaps_found)	Number of sitemaps processed (including child sitemaps in an index)
Validation errors	Structural or schema issues found
Unreachable URLs	The sampled URLs that returned a failing HTTP status
Sample size	Number of URLs actually sampled for reachability
Unreachable percent	Share of the sample that was unreachable
Discovered from	Where the sitemap URL came from (explicit, robots.txt, or default)

Example Result

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
  Total URLs:        342
  Sitemaps found:    1
  Sample size:       20
  Unreachable URLs:  1
    - https://example.com/old-page (404)
  Unreachable:       5.0%
  Validation errors: 0
  Discovered from:   default

URL collection is capped at 5000 URLs across all sitemaps; beyond that, a "truncated" validation note is added.

Alerts

Event	Trigger	Severity
warning.sitemap_issues	Sitemap is missing, has validation errors, contains unreachable URLs, or exceeds size limits	Warning

The alert details the specific issues found -- missing sitemap, XML errors, unreachable URLs with their status codes, or protocol violations.

Common Issues

• 404 on sitemap.xml -- Sitemap file is missing or the URL path is incorrect
• URLs returning 404 -- Content was removed but the sitemap was not updated
• Exceeding 50,000 URLs -- Split into multiple sitemaps using a sitemap index
• Stale <lastmod> dates -- Dates that do not reflect actual content changes reduce crawl efficiency