5 min read
Bulk-edit an XML sitemap in Excel
By Quentin Delepierre, Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant
An XML sitemap lists every URL on your site with its metadata (lastmod, changefreq, priority). Fixing it by hand becomes unmanageable past a few hundred URLs. Here's how to edit it in a spreadsheet, then rebuild a valid sitemap for Google Search Console.
When do you need to edit a sitemap?
A sitemap follows a strict format: one <url> tag per page, containing <loc>, and optionally <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority>. A single malformed tag and Google rejects the whole file.
You often need to touch it: refresh dates after a redesign, remove hundreds of stale URLs after a migration, tune priorities by page type, or merge several sitemaps. All of these are trivial in a spreadsheet and painful by hand.
Edit your sitemap in 3 steps
- Drop your sitemap.xml file on the ExcelifyXML Upload page. The free preview shows one row per <url> and the number of URLs: confirm to get the CSV (1 credit).
- Each URL becomes a row, with loc, lastmod, changefreq and priority columns. Edit, sort, filter or delete rows in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
- Drop the edited CSV back with its skeleton.json on the Rebuild page ("Separate files"): you get a valid XML sitemap, ready to submit to Search Console.
What you can do in a few minutes
- Update every <lastmod> date at once after a release.
- Bulk-delete URLs from an old structure after a migration.
- Adjust <priority> by section (products, blog posts, legal pages).
- Spot and fix duplicate or malformed URLs using spreadsheet filters.
- Merge several exports into a single clean sitemap.
A sitemap that stays valid
ExcelifyXML keeps the sitemap structure and namespace (http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9) in a manifest, and rebuilds the file in the format search engines expect. Special characters in URLs (ampersands, parameters) are re-encoded correctly, for a file accepted without error.
One trap to know: opened by double-click, Excel takes <lastmod> dates such as 2026-09-01 for dates and saves them back its own way (9/1/2026), a format the sitemap protocol doesn't accept. Import the CSV with Data › From Text/CSV instead, the lastmod column as Text. If a date still changed format, the reconstruction stops and shows you the rows at stake, before producing an invalid sitemap.
Security and privacy
The file is processed in memory on European Union servers then deleted immediately — no storage, no metadata retained. Your URLs are only used to generate your sitemap.
Open your XML sitemap in Excel now:
Transform a file