There are several cases where this might happen.
Open your sitemap in a browser and look at the source code. This can usually be seen with the key combination Cmd/Ctrl+U or right click then select ‘View source…’ Then scan the produced source (if any) for errors.
A. If you see strange output in the first few lines (head tags) of the source, then there is a conflict or bug occuring on your installation. Please go to the Support forum for help.
B. If the source is empty or incomplete then you’re probably experiencing an issue with your servers PHP memory limit. In those cases, you should see a messages like PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted. in your server/account error log file.
This can happen on large sites. To avoid these issues, there is an option to split posts over different sitemaps on Settings > XML Sitemap. Try different settings, each time revisiting the main sitemap index file and open different sitemaps listed there to check.
Read more on Increasing memory allocated to PHP (try a value higher than 256M) or ask your hosting provider what you can do.
There is no actual file created. The sitemap is dynamically generated just like a feed.
You are most likely looking at a sitemap.xml file that has been created by another XML Sitemap plugin before you started using this one. Remove that file and let the plugin dynamically generate it just like a feed. There will not be any actual files created.
If that’s not the case, you are probably using a caching plugin or your browser does not update to the latest feed output. Please verify.
The sitemaps are designed to NOT be cached. This is done to make sure search engines will always get a fresh sitemap.
The absolute first thing you need to check is your blogs privacy settings. Go to Settings > Privacy and make sure you are allowing search engines to index your site. If they are blocked, your sitemap will not be available.
Then, you might want to make sure that there is at least ONE post published. WordPress is known to send 404 status headers with feed requests when there are NO posts. Even though the plugin tries to prevent that, in some cases the wrong status header will get sent anyway and Google Search Console will report a vague message like:
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap.
Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be
accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.
If that did not solve the issue, check the following errors that might be encountered along with their respective solutions:
404 page instead of my sitemap.xml
Try to refresh the Permalink structure in WordPress. Go to Settings > Permalinks and re-save them. Then reload the XML Sitemap in your browser with a clean browser cache. ( Try Ctrl+R to bypass the browser cache — this works on most but not all browsers. )
404 page instead of both sitemap.xml and robots.txt
There are plugins like Event Calendar (at least v.3.2.beta2) known to mess with rewrite rules, causing problems with WordPress internal feeds and robots.txt generation and thus conflict with the XML Sitemap Feed plugin. Deactivate all plugins and see if you get a basic robots.txt file showing:User-agent: * Disallow:
Reactivate your plugins one by one to find out which one is causing the problem. Then report the bug to the plugin developer.
404 page instead of robots.txt while sitemap.xml works fine
There is a known issue with WordPress (at least up to 2.8) not generating a robots.txt when there are no posts with published status. If you use WordPress as a CMS with only pages, this will affect you.
To get around this, you might either at least write one post and give it Private status or alternatively create your own robots.txt file containing:
`
Sitemap: http://yourblog.url/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Allow: /
`
and upload it to your web root…
Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred
On some setups (usually using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin) this error may occur. The problem is known, the cause is not… Until I find out why this is happening, please take comfort in knowing that this only affects reading the sitemap in normal browsers but will NOT affect any spidering/indexing on your site. The sitemap is still readable by all search engines!
XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
This error occurs when blank lines or other output is generated before the start of the actual sitemap content. This can be caused by blank lines at the beginning of wp-config.php or your themes functions.php or by another plugin that generates output where it shouldn’t. You’ll need to test by disabling all other plugins, switching to the default theme and manually inspecting your wp-config.php file.
There are several error messages that you can encounter when trying to sey up your site connection. They have different causes. See an overview of possible connection errors on https://premium.status301.com/xml-sitemap-google-news/google-search-console-connection-errors/