Generate a dynamic sitemap.xml with Next.js

Today we are going to learn how we can generate a sitemap.xml dynamically with Next.js. This is very useful if we have separate links for each of our articles and want to generate their sitemap.xml. With this technique, we will greatly improve the SEO of our website and help search engines properly index our site.

The first thing we’ll do is create a file called sitemap.xml.tsx.

const EXTERNAL_DATA_URL = 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts';

function generateSiteMap(posts) {
  return `<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
     <!--We manually set the two URLs we know already-->
     <url>
       <loc>https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com</loc>
     </url>
     <url>
       <loc>https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/guide</loc>
     </url>
     ${posts
       .map(({ id }) => {
         return `
       <url>
           <loc>${`${EXTERNAL_DATA_URL}/${id}`}</loc>
           <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
           <priority>0.5</priority>
       </url>
     `;
       })
       .join('')}
   </urlset>
 `;
}

function SiteMap() {
  // getServerSideProps will do the heavy lifting
}

export async function getServerSideProps({ res }) {
  // We make an API call to gather the URLs for our site
  const request = await fetch(EXTERNAL_DATA_URL);
  const posts = await request.json();

  // We generate the XML sitemap with the posts data
  const sitemap = generateSiteMap(posts);

  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/xml');
  // we send the XML to the browser
  res.write(sitemap);
  res.end();

  return {
    props: {},
  };
}

export default SiteMap;

In this example, we are going to generate a sitemap.xml using sample data. You’ll need to create your own queries to iterate through each of your articles and generate their URL.

When we visit ourwebsite/sitemap.xml, it will display the pages added to the index.

Remember that the maximum URLs per sitemap.xml file are 50,000.

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