Issues with sitemap after making changes to slug on homepage

After all that decided to flush the cache via my webhost dashboard instead of through WordPress dashboard.

Mobile version is now showing latest updated version of my page.

It’s also interesting that when I view the sitemap in Google Search console from my mobile. It’s still returning a 404 error, but this doesn’t happen when I’m viewing it on desktop.

I also tried reloading the sitemap to Google Search Console, but it is still saying that it can’t fetch the page. Should I just wait for Google to do it’s thing and hope that it will resolve over time?

@debbieweeks2

We’re sorry you’re having trouble with the sitemap after a recent change you made in the homepage slug. I imagine this can be frustrating for you. We’d like to look a closer look.

Regarding homepage slug and the sitemap got screwed after that might merely be a coincidence. Having said that while we tried to access the sitemap link https://www.kidstherapycorner.com.au/sitemap_index.xml we see it returning 404 page not found.

Alternatively, we tried to access the sitemap via non-pretty permalink https://www.kidstherapycorner.com.au/?sitemap=1 and it does show the sitemap fine. Likewise, the page sitemap seems to be accessbile via same approach.

We highlighted this case here because it seems your server is NGINX and is not setup to rewrite and, thus, you’ll need to add rewrite rules to have the sitemap accessible via pretty permalink.

You can get more details here: https://yoast.com/help/xml-sitemaps-nginx/

After fixing the above issue, we would recommend that you resubmit the sitemap into your Google Search Console.

Make sure that you clear all your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like CloudFlare or browser. If you are not sure how to clear caching from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide:?https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/.

Monitor the results to see if the issue is resolved. It can take some time before Google can report on the crawled URLs after you re-submit your sitemap.

We hope this helps fix the issue. Please let us know if you have any questions; we’re happy to help.

Thank you so much Suwash.

I do believe the homepage was screwed up by changing the slug and that’s why I created a new one. I just wish the WordPress sent me an email to help me find the issue. Just didn’t realise that there would be a problem with the sitemap too.

I’ve working on this for a week. I’ve been doing a ton of research into this issue trying to understand what has gone wrong. But it’s ok because the homepage is displaying properly now on mobile, just need to fix the sitemap, so it’s almost fixed.

On the plus side, my website is finally seeing some organic traffic since I finally figured out what key phrase I should be trying to rank for so I’m pretty happy right now.

I also didn’t realise that I was running on NGINX (probably should, but I’m still learning).

I’ll have to discuss adding the rewrite rules with my web host since I’m not comfortable with modifying code.

I’ll keep you posted on the result.

Thanks again.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by debbieweeks2.

Hi,

We’re glad to hear you were able to resolve some of the issues on your website and are now picking up traffic and traction.

Upon checking https://www.kidstherapycorner.com.au/sitemap_index.xml, we do see it now loading as expected. Please do make sure you’ve removed any outdated sitemaps and resubmit the /sitemap_index.xml to GSC – https://yoast.com/help/submit-sitemap-search-engines/#google-remove

Best of luck in further optimizing your site!

Thank you so much.

Yes, I just tested it too to see if there was any change, and it is no longer returning an error, but yesterday I added /categories to the sitemaps. Not sure if that had anything to do with it.

The HTTP error is still showing for the /page_sitemap.xml, but I am now wondering if this may be related to my SSL certificate, because my webhost had to revoke and reissue all SSL certificates because of a security incident which recently occured with them..

I also tested https://www.kidstherapycorner.com.au/page-sitemap.xml as a live URL and google said the page can now be fetched (it wasn’t two days ago). I think I might wait a little longer to see if the error resolves on it’s own before trying to call my webhost. Maybe there’s nothing more to fix.

Thanks again.

• This reply was modified 3 years ago by debbieweeks2.
• This reply was modified 3 years ago by debbieweeks2.
• This reply was modified 3 years ago by debbieweeks2.
• This reply was modified 3 years ago by debbieweeks2.

Hi,

If you’ve resolved the issue with the SSL certificate, and the https://www version is loading just fine, then there probably shouldn’t be an issue anymore. We would recommend removing and resubmitting the sitemap and then monitoring it for the next couple of days. Google’s crawlers should eventually be able to crawl the submitted sitemap and parse and discover the URLs.

Thank you.

I have removed and resubmitted the sitemap and will wait a few more days, then check with my webhost to see when the new SSL certificate has been fully enabled.

Once again thank you so much for your help.

Hi,

We’re glad to be of help. We’ll be setting this forum thread to closed in order to keep the forum overview.

Should you have any other issues or concerns with the Yoast SEO plugin, please do feel free to create a new topic. Thanks!

I know this thread has been closed but I just wanted to share (for the benefit of others) that the error with my sitemap has gone and is now showing a success message.