Published on September 23, 2020 | Posted in Wordpress
How to remove author sitemaps from WordPress
In the WordPress 5.5 release they have added the ability to generate a XML sitemap. XML sitemap are great because it tell search engines such as Google and Bing what pages to crawl. One of the sitemap which the WordPress core creates is a user sitemap. On a WordPress site I work on we didn’t want to use this feature, so I’m going to go through the process how to disable the sitemap.
The way in which I can do this is a placing the following code below into your functions.php
function remove_author_category_pages_from_sitemap($provider, $name)
{
if ('users' === $name) {
return false;
}
return $provider;
}
add_filter('wp_sitemaps_add_provider', 'remove_author_category_pages_from_sitemap', 10, 2);
What the code does is creates a function called remove_author_category_pages_from_sitemap with two arguments $provider and $name. If the name of the sitemap is users the function return false. Otherwise if it’s not a user sitemap it will build the xml file as usual.
We then create a add_filter hook on wp_sitemaps_add_provider then add the function we just created. Finally we give the sitemap a priority of 10 and tell the hook to accept 2 arguments.
As you can see from the code above it’s very easy to remove user sitemaps from your WordPress site.
This works beautifully. Can’t understand why this was implemented since it creates less secure websites by giving away the admin login. Thanks so much for posting this.
Works perfectly. Love not having to add the Yoast plugin to do this. Thank you for this!
thanks dude i was looking for this.
Thank you, you’re brilliant, I didn’t know how to deal with it and I didn’t want to install seo plugins. Thank you, my friend
Thank you! This code saves the hassle of installing plugins and gets the job done.
You’re not limited to ‘users’ in this solution either. Here are the other possible $name values.
posts
taxonomies
users
posts
If you wanted to remove the post categories, you could include
if (‘users’ === $name || ‘taxonomies’ === $name) {
Thankyou 😉
Thanks so much. This really helped
Thank you very much for this. It works perfectly to remove authors from the default wp-sitemap.xml