From time to time, we as SEO’s need to generate a list of every URL on your site. Most of the time this is to do some sort of audit on your URLs, paste them into a text editor to work with in some other way, etc.
A lot of people download the sitemap.xml file and aren’t sure what program to open it up with. If you open it in notepad you have your URL’s surrounded with all sorts of tags that makes it really difficult to work with. Below we will outline as well as show you in a video, the best way to convert a sitemap.xml file to a plain text document.
Without further delay, here are a few simple steps to convert an xml sitemap to a txt file:
- Download your sitemap file by doing a “save as” when you are on the page. For instance if your website is https://www.example.com go to https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml and hit “save as”
- Open up your sitemap.xml file in Micorosoft Excel or some other spreadsheet program (untested)
- Highlight the column of URLS. This is normally the first column.
- Paste into notepad or a plain text editor of your choice.
- Save, preferably as a TXT document…and you are done!
Doesn’t get much easier than that, does it!
2023 Video Update:
Original video in 480p for archival purposes:
For MAC users, the directions don’t get much different than that other than the small details.
