Fatal error to install XML Sitemap plugin

Hi Eduardo, I responded to your email about half an hour ago. Maybe it landed in the spam folder?

My question is: where does the error occur? On a post sitemap? In your mail there was a screen shot of memory errors, so it might help to set the “Split by” option to “Month” on Settings > XML Sitemap…

From this topic title I understand that the error occurs during plugin installation. Is that the case? Is that the Google News Advanced extension plugin or the main XML Sitemap & Google News plugin? And is that when installing or when activating?

When changing to Year or Month is when it causes problems. It does not group the links by year or month. You have consumed all the resources of the web server.

That is very strange… Is there any chance I can take a look on the admin side? If you create a temporary admin account and send me the details via https://premium.status301.com/contact/ ?

Or do you see any related errors in the server error log?

So you have only the XML Sitemap & Google News plugin activated now? And can you switch to Month or Year or does that still cause a problem?

If you set “Split by: Month” you will have less posts per sitemap. On option to split by “Number” is planned for a future version but not ready yet…

Hi Eduardo, I’ve entered both your sitemap.xml and your sitemap-posttype-post.2019.xml in the online validator tool https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html and both are valid.

Maybe the error is an old one and will disappear after a while. Or you can try removing the sitemap from your Search Console and then submit it again. Hopefully the spider will re-validate it then.

Or… you can set the option Split by to Month which will make the sitemaps smaller and faster to index. 🙂

Hi Eduardo, I checked your yearly post sitemaps a few times. They are really slow and I even saw the 5OO internal server error once.

Make sure you keep your option ‘Split by’ on ‘Month’. Your monthly sitemaps load fast enough and all are correct.

However, even though the response is correct, the status code that is returned by the server is 4O4 which means “not found”. I suspect Google sees this as a problem (and it is!) so it will not treat the sitemaps further.

Do you have any idea why your server or WordPress itself would return a 404 status code for posts or feeds?

It all looks correct. Only the response status 404 is wrong. I’ve only seen this happen on older WordPress versions without any posts published but that is certainly not the case here.

I wonder if it’s a conflict with another plugin.

Any chance you could create a temporary admin account so I can take a look on the back end? You can send me the details via the contact form or a private message (link “send a message” under my icon on the left here).

Or, if you are not afraid of modifying PHP files, you can try this:

1. Go to Plugins > Plugin Editor and select XML Sitemap & Google News on the top right.
2. Open >models in files list on the right en choose the file functions.public-shared.php
3. There you will see the first function:

function xmlsf_headers( $headers ) {
	// set noindex
	$headers['X-Robots-Tag'] = 'noindex, follow';
	$headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/xml; charset=' . get_bloginfo('charset');
	return $headers;
}

Now add a new line right after function xmlsf_headers( $headers ) { and enter $headers['Status'] = '200'; there. It should look like:

function xmlsf_headers( $headers ) {
	$headers['Status'] = '200';
	// set noindex
	$headers['X-Robots-Tag'] = 'noindex, follow';
	$headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/xml; charset=' . get_bloginfo('charset');
	return $headers;
}

Then click the button Update File at the bottom.

Let me know and I’ll check the response status of your sitemaps again 🙂

Hi Eduardo, thanks for confirming!

Apparently, forcing the Status response to 200 is enough. I’ll work that into the next release so you won’t need to do this edit again after updating the plugin.

If you ever find out why this 404 response occurs or where it is coming from, we’d really like to know 🙂