How often do you clean up and submit an updated XML sitemap?

This is just a maintenance work that so many people neglect until the problem start to show up. If your sitemap has dead links or outdated pages, Google would waste time crawling nonsense instead of your fresh content. Some people say submit sitemap weekly, others say monthly but the truth be is, it depend on how often you publish.

I will admit that, as much as I know I should clean up and submit an updated XML sitemap and I know how important it is for me to do so, I tend to fall short when it comes to keeping it updated, and it can’t help my sites at all.

I do need to get into the habit of planning when I should update and clean up my XML sitemap, as I know it can make a huge difference.

Right now, I have this done automatically by the software I use. I believe that it will clean-up/add new results to the XML sitemap every ~15 minutes, with items being removed from the sitemap that are older than X days, dependent on the area and the amount of content it has (since I clearly don’t want it to delete or remove all entries).

Ironically, I have the same logic applied to the RSS feeds (I am still unsure how many people use RSS anymore) so that they are aligned content wise, and search engines/AI crawlers can effectively always have the most up to date information with ease.

On Sep 15, 2026, Uptrend said:

This is just a maintenance work that so many people neglect until the problem start to show up. If your sitemap has dead links or outdated pages, Google would waste time crawling nonsense instead of your fresh content. Some people say submit sitemap weekly, others say monthly but the truth be is, it depend on how often you publish.

I don’t ever update my sitemap. It’s automatically updated through my forum software. The only time you’ll have to update your sitemap is if you created it manually.