description: Hugo ships with a built-in template file observing the v0.9 of the Sitemap Protocol, but you can override this template if needed.
date: 2017-02-01
publishdate: 2017-02-01
lastmod: 2017-02-01
categories: [templates]
keywords: [sitemap, xml, templates]
menu:
docs:
parent: "templates"
weight: 160
weight: 160
sections_weight: 160
draft: false
aliases: [/layout/sitemap/,/templates/sitemap/]
toc: false
---
A single Sitemap template is used to generate the `sitemap.xml` file.
Hugo automatically comes with this template file. *No work is needed on
the users' part unless they want to customize `sitemap.xml`.*
A sitemap is a `Page` and therefore has all the [page variables][pagevars] available to use in this template along with Sitemap-specific ones:
`.Sitemap.ChangeFreq`
: The page change frequency
`.Sitemap.Priority`
: The priority of the page
`.Sitemap.Filename`
: The sitemap filename
If provided, Hugo will use `/layouts/sitemap.xml` instead of the internal `sitemap.xml` template that ships with Hugo.
## Sitemap Templates
Hugo has built-on Sitemap templates, but you can provide your own if needed, in either `layouts/sitemap.xml` or `layouts/_default/sitemap.xml`.
For multilingual sites, we also create a Sitemap index. You can provide a custom layout for that in either `layouts/sitemapindex.xml` or `layouts/_default/sitemapindex.xml`.
Defaults for `<changefreq>`, `<priority>` and `filename` values can be set in the site's config file, e.g.:
{{<code-togglefile="config">}}
[sitemap]
changefreq = "monthly"
priority = 0.5
filename = "sitemap.xml"
{{</code-toggle>}}
The same fields can be specified in an individual content file's front matter in order to override the value assigned to that piece of content at render time.