5 min read
Bulk-edit an XML sitemap in Excel
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.
- 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 CSV back on the Reconstruction page: 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.
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