I have my site's page links in an Excel column, with a last-modified date next to each. How do I turn that into a sitemap.xml file?

Prepare the sheet before exporting

• Column one: the full URL starting with https://.
• Column two: the last-modified date, or an empty cell if you do not know it.
• No other columns. Leave a product name column in between and the name gets glued to the URL and the row is rejected.
• Set the date column to a custom yyyy-mm-dd format, because Excel often shows dates day first, and those are not read as dates.

Then save the file as CSV. If your Excel uses semicolons instead of commas, that is fine: the tool accepts a comma, a semicolon or a tab between the URL and the date, and it accepts values wrapped in quotation marks.

What the tool does with the file

We tried a three-line file: a header row reading url,lastmod, then page a with the date 2026-03-01, then page b with an empty date cell. A note said the first line looked like a column header and was skipped, and the file came out like this:

<url> <loc>https://example.com/a</loc> <lastmod>2026-03-01</lastmod> </url> <url> <loc>https://example.com/b</loc> </url>

Page b got no date at all. The tool never invents one or puts the current date there. If you want one date for every row left blank, type it into 'Last-modified date for all URLs'; a date written on the row itself still takes priority.

Steps

1. Save the sheet as CSV with just the two columns.
2. In the XML sitemap generator, drag the file onto the upload area, or paste the two columns into the URL box.
3. Check the counts above the output: valid URLs, duplicates removed, rejected lines and URLs with lastmod.
4. Open the list of rejected lines if there is one, fix each row in the sheet by its number, and upload again.
5. Download sitemap.xml and upload it to your site's root folder.

Common slips from Excel

In a second test we kept a third column for the product name, so the row became https://example.com/a,Oud Oil,2026-03-01. It was rejected as 'not a valid URL, or it contains spaces', because the tool splits the date off at the last comma only, which left the product name, space and all, stuck to the URL. The fix is to delete the extra column.

If your sheet lists the same URL more than once, the tool drops the repeat and reports both row numbers. To tidy the list before uploading, paste the column into the Duplicate-line remover. The file is read inside your browser and never uploaded to a server; the limit is 20 MB.