How to create a sitemap in Laravel 9

Before deploying our Laravel project, we may need to create a sitemap to improve the SEO of our web page.

We can create a sitemap with Laravel in just three simple steps:

First, we create the route

We include the sitemap route in the file routes/web.php:

Route::get('/sitemap.xml', [SitemapXmlController::class, 'index']);

Second, we create the controller

We create the sitemap controller in the console:

php artisan make:controller SitemapXmlController

In the controller file app/Http/Controllers/SitemapXmlController.php we include:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\Models\Page;

class SitemapXmlController extends Controller
{
    public function index() {        
        $pages = Page::where('publish', 1)->get();   
          
        return response()->view('sitemap', [
            'pages' => $pages
        ])->header('Content-Type', 'text/xml');
    }
}

Third, we create the view

We create the sitemap view in resources/views/sitemap.blade.php:

<?php echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>'; ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">    
    @foreach ($pages as $page)
        <url>
            <loc>{{ url('/') }}/{{ $page->slug }}/</loc>
            <lastmod>{{ $page->updated_at->tz('UTC')->toAtomString() }}</lastmod>
            <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
            <priority>0.8</priority>
        </url>
    @endforeach
</urlset>

And that is all.

We can see our sitemap at https://ourwebpage/sitemap.xml