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.