When you see the warnings regarding the sitemap.xml format errors, you can check whether you are experiencing the following problems:
- Your sitemap may not have the URL format. In this case, it may not have www or the address of the file in question may have been defined as HTTP instead of HTTPS. However, your sitemap must have the same URL format as your website. So you need to solve this problem urgently.
For this, go to your website dashboard. Follow the steps of Admin> Settings> General one by one. Then click on “Change site URL”. In this way, you will change the relevant protocol.
What is more about Sitemap.xml files format errors?
A little clue: If you have recently made changes to the format or format of the URL, there may be incorrectly formatted addresses in your website’s database. In this case, you will have to make the corrections step by step from the oldest to the newest. Remember that for this you need to back up your database.
- It is also possible to get a warning about the unsupported format on Google Search Console. If your file looks like any other HTML page, this will result in this warning. The reason for this is that when using W3 Total Cache, you hide the sitemap for standard visitors. This situation negatively affects the sitemap format. You can set a new user agent group to avoid this situation.
After you complete your checks on the above two different format problems, run your re-audit. You will notice that the problem has been resolved. Generally, sitemap.xml format errors are caused by these.