Your XML sitemap should be uploaded to your website's root directory, typically accessible at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Most WordPress sites generate this automatically at that location. If you're managing multiple sitemaps or have a larger site architecture, you can place them in subfolders like yoursite.com/blog/sitemap.xml, but the root location is standard practice and easiest for search engines to find. After uploading, submit the sitemap URL directly in Google Search Console under the Sitemaps section. Go to your property, click Sitemaps in the left menu, paste the full sitemap URL, and submit. Do the same in Bing Webmaster Tools since Bing doesn't automatically inherit Google's data for Canadian sites. This manual submission ensures both engines know exactly where to look rather than waiting for them to discover it through crawling. You should also reference your sitemap in your robots.txt file by adding a line like "Sitemap: https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml" at the bottom. This gives crawlers another discovery path and is considered best practice, though it's not a replacement for Search Console submission. For larger sites we manage in the Ottawa SEO portfolio, we often split sitemaps by content type—one for pages, one for posts, one for products—then link them all in a sitemap index file at the root. Google allows up to 50,000 URLs per sitemap file and a 50MB uncompressed limit, so if you're approaching those thresholds, splitting becomes necessary. One mistake we see constantly: uploading the sitemap but forgetting to submit it in Search Console, then wondering why indexing is slow. The upload alone doesn't notify Google. Another issue is sitemap URLs not matching your canonical URLs—if your sitemap lists http but your site redirects to https, you're creating confusion. Always audit that your sitemap URLs are the exact versions you want indexed, with proper protocols and trailing slash consistency matching your site's URL structure.