IG XML sitemap generator pro
A powerful sitemap generator for professional use.

OpenCart comes complete with its very own sitemap generator; however, if you have a store with more than a few thousand items, you'll come to find it doesn't work quite as well as it should. The more stock you have, the closer you get to having your sitemap timeout completely before it has finished generating. There are no options to exclude disabled products, categories or information, the URLs aren't tidy or SEO friendly and everything is clumped into one sitemap page. To make matters worse, if a search engine attempted to crawl the contents of the sitemap, they will soon hit a server timeout and as a result may not index any of the pages in your site at all.

IG XML sitemap generator pro has been tested to success on more than 35,000 product listings. Each sitemap contains links to the group page along with all associated images, image titles, priority, last modified dates, change frequency, optional sitemap styling and optional include/exclude disabled content... everything you need to help get your site indexed.

Sitemap styling
You may have noticed the following text on your own and many other sitemaps on the net:

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

Which in and of itself is completely fine. Search engines don't render any style sheets anyway so it does nothing to harm SEO; however, it doesn't make for easy viewing material for yourself and the occasional user who may be viewing your sitemap. Imagine you have an index of 3 stores in one sitemap, it'd be easy enough to read the information there, copy and paste links to follow on, then the next page has an index of 10 or more sitemaps with each sitemap containing hundreds if not thousands of links, images, titles, priorities etc it soon becomes an impossible task to look through them all and decipher the information. Sitemap styling tidies up a document tree making looking for broken links, missing images and the wrong information a lot easier.

Disabled content
A big issue with most sitemaps is having content listed that can't be accessed and more times than not it's down to having disabled content listed within the sitemap. IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro has taken care of this issue by giving you the option to either include or exclude disabled products, categories and information pages from their respective sitemaps.

Multi-store compatible
Another issue with many sitemap generators is in them not having the ability to take specific content from each store and list in separate sitemaps, with the correct URL for the corresponding store used within links. IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro takes care of this with ease, whether it's one store or 20, you can be confident that each store's sitemap will be written individually and only contain the content designated to it.

Unlimited content
Many of the sitemap generators will falter or stop working completely after 10,000 or so listings, IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro has been tested with over 35,000 product listings, each containing images and passed every test with flying colours. With IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro you can be assured all your content will be listed completely and accurately.

Content limit
If you offer a lot of items within your store, you may want to add limits to how many are listed within each sitemap. This prevents heavy loading times and will make keeping within the search engine sitemap limit specifications a much easier task. Say you have 50,000 items listed but only wanted only 1,000 products listed within each sitemap, with IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro all you need to do is type 1,000 in the products listing limit on the settings tab and the next time you generate the products sitemap, it will be split into 50 sitemaps, each containing 1,000 listings.

Separate sitemaps
The generator splits the information up in the following way: first there are the stores, then content from each store is separated into groups, each group contains an index of sitemaps relating to it with each sitemap containing the content. This makes moving though your sitemap a breeze. No more scrolling up and down to find a category or brand mixed in amongst the products.

Full control
The settings tab lets you set features such as include/exclude disabled content, change frequency, priority, content limit and styling.

robots.txt editor
This feature allows you to create or edit your robots.txt file straight from your console.

Manual control
Many people believe an automated sitemap is best, the problem with automation is that generally speaking it will update at a given date and time whether or not any changes have been made, it may also automatically ping search engines with your unchanged sitemaps and can use up valuable resources unnecessarily in the process. Nothing beats manual control, whenever you have finished making updates to your site whether it's new products, categories or pages, all you have to do is go back to the sitemap dashboard and generate the sitemap for the relevant group. This gives you complete control of sitemap accuracy and what search engines do or don't receive.

Backup
From the second sitemap generation onward a backup copy of the original sitemap is stored. If you've clicked the generate sitemap button by accident and don't want your index showing the current date as the last modified date, all you need to do is click restore and the sitemap will be restored from the previous, making a backup copy of the newly generated sitemap should you change your mind.

Sitemap submit
Ping your sitemap directly to the Bing or Google search engines at a click of a button. This isn't a substitute for owning a webmaster account with whichever search engine and submitting your sitemap manually. There are more benefits to owning a webmaster account such as the ability to view which links have been indexed and any errors picked up by bots etc.

vqMod access
Thanks to FiveStar if you have vqMod installed you can now access IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro from the extensions list in the sidebar of your admin dashboard. None of the site's core files are changed for this feature.

Built in help centre
Finally there is a built in help centre with all the details you need to understand the ins and outs of IG XML Sitemap Generator Pro.

Requirements
SEO URLs switched on
PHP 5.x
vqMod (optional 2.3.x only)

Installation
Simply unzip the downloaded file, the directory contains a file named install-instructions, follow the instructions contained within and you'll be up and running in just a few minutes.

**White Screen Patch**
Some servers may be set up to download XSL files as an oppose to rendering them, if this is the case with your site, download the White Screen Patch and upload the contents of the upload folder, this should fix the white screen problems that occur as a result.

This plugin was developed on an unedited version of the OpenCart software. If you encounter any errors with the plugin's use on your website, please use the "get support" link underneath the download button on this page.