@globalrick
We’re sorry to read about the trouble you are experiencing with your sitemap. We can comprehend that the issue of sitemap performance seems to be closely related to your website being fairly large. We also want to mention that our developers are working on rebuilding the entire XML sitemap logic which will improve the sitemap loading speed on large sites like yours. However, we don’t have an ETA yet as to when this will be available. The new sitemap functionality will make more efficient use of the WordPress database so the generation of an XML sitemap will become much faster and less resource-consuming.
In the meantime, if you encounter any issues with the generation of Yoast XML sitemaps, we’d recommend you check out these suggestions:
- Reduce the size of the sitemap by excluding some posts, post types or taxonomies. This help article explains how to customize your sitemap.
- Try different numbers of items per sitemap using the
wpseo_sitemap_entries_per_page filter and choose one that ensures the server can process the generation of the sitemap correctly.
- Create a static sitemap file as suggested on this link. Notice that this solution is suggested by a 3rd party website so we are unable to support it and help with its implementation.
- Try to enable sitemap transient caching. You or your developer can use the
wpseo_enable_xml_sitemap_transient_caching filter to customize this feature. An example code snippet can be found here. The sitemaps will continue to update upon changes (add, remove, modifications), but instead of creating the sitemaps each time they are loaded, the plugin will store a copy of the sitemaps in the database and serve this ‘cached’ version instead of building it from scratch each time.
- Use a 3rd-party plugin or service to cache XML sitemaps. Although we are unable to recommend any specific plugins this article about how to prevent sitemaps from being cached mentions a few you may consider.
Regarding your second questions, disabling or deleting the Yoast SEO plugin will also disable the sitemap and therefore Google Search Console will not able to fetch it.
Please let us know if you have any further information or suggestions regarding this issue.
