Hi @yarr2 ,
Great question! I do understand where you’re coming from, especially on larger sites.
At the moment, AIOSEO doesn’t support generating static sitemap files. Our sitemaps are dynamic by design so they’re always up to date and don’t require file regeneration or maintenance.
That said, what you’re describing can definitely feel like unnecessary load on bigger sites. The good news is that AIOSEO already handles this in a way that keeps things lighter. It splits your main sitemap into multiple smaller dynamic sitemaps, so each request only processes a portion of your URLs, not the entire site.
If you’re still seeing performance impact, one simple tweak that really helps is lowering the “Links Per Sitemap” setting (AIOSEO → Sitemaps). This creates more smaller sitemap files, which reduces the work done on each request.
We have covered this in our documentation here-
https://aioseo.com/docs/how-to-create-an-xml-sitemap/#configuring-the-xml-sitemap
Also, just to clarify, search engines hitting sitemap URLs is normal behavior. It can feel heavy on the server at times, but it’s not the same as a DDoS, and most setups handle this well with proper caching in place.
I really appreciate you bringing this up. Please let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be happy to help.
Thread Starter
yarr2
(@yarr2)
I guess a marketologist wrote this article…
All sitemaps are up to date, if they are made after the last update on the site was made and till the next update on the site is made. AIOSEO 3 was handling sitemaps in a much better way, when static sitemaps were generated once automatically after an update was made on the website. Just what is the reason to generate sitemap on every request if no any changes were made on the website?… To generate sitemaps by cron is even a better option.
Nowadays dev team made possible to ddos any big enough website with AIOSEO 4.x just by requesting sitemaps in a infinite loop.
This plugin is only producing higher load and cause lowering websites in search results due to longer responces due to higher load. And I’m not even talking about much higher load to database server due to much bigger number of queries made and bloating of code with completely unnecessary features, most of which are never used…
And, please, remove Resolved sign, since this question is quite far from any resolution yet…
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This reply was modified 3 weeks, 3 days ago by
yarr2.
Hi @yarr2,
I do understand your concern here, especially on larger sites. Dynamic sitemaps can feel heavier compared to a static or cron-based approach, particularly if the sitemap is being hit frequently.
That said, AIOSEO’s sitemap system is designed to split sitemaps into smaller chunks and only process what’s needed per request, rather than generating everything at once. In most environments, this keeps the load manageable.
What you’re describing with repeated requests is usually more related to how often the sitemap endpoints are being hit (bots, crawlers, or loops), rather than the sitemap generation itself. In those cases, the best place to control that is at the server or CDN level (rate limiting, caching, etc.), so the requests don’t keep reaching PHP repeatedly.
Your point about static or cron-based generation is valid from a performance perspective, and I’ve shared this as feedback with our team.
If you’re open to sharing, it would really help to understand your setup a bit more (site size, hosting, caching/CDN, etc.), just so we can see if there’s anything specific contributing to the load in your case.
Appreciate you taking the time to explain your perspective.
Hi @yarr2 ,
We haven’t heard back from you in a couple of days. I’m going to go ahead and close this thread for now. But if you’d like us to assist, please feel welcome to continue the conversation.
Thanks!
Thread Starter
yarr2
(@yarr2)
Probably you never saw how sitemap were build in AIOSEO 3.x. It was build only once after post or page update was made. So it always was up-to-date and was not rebuild on any request.
You can check how 4.x is working on any website, which have about few thousand posts. Caching, CDN, etc are just additional overheads, which may help partially solve problems. You are just making problems in order to show how they may be solved instead of avoiding.
