Sitemaps and drafts

Control which pages end up in your sitemap, and let work-in-progress pages live alongside published ones without leaking into production. Those are separate switches, and knowing which one you want is most of the work.

Two terms used below:

Sitemap index. The root sitemap.xml that lists per-language sitemaps when multilingual is on.
Drafts preprocessor. The build-time hook Baseline registers to drop draft: true pages from any build (and only from builds; serving and watching keep them).

What you will build

Pages that appear in sitemap.xml, and pages that don't.
Per-page sitemap controls: ignore, changefreq, priority, lastmod.
Draft pages that render in dev and quietly disappear in production.

Prerequisites

settings.url set, so the <loc> entries come out absolute. The sitemap module is on by default, so there are no new options to add.

Page with sitemap controls

Create src/content/pages/sitemap-demo.md:

---
title: 'Sitemap Demo'
slug: 'sitemap-demo'
description: 'Control sitemap entries.'
layout: 'layouts/base.njk'
sitemap:
  changefreq: 'weekly'
  priority: 0.7
  lastmod: 2024-01-01
---

This page stays in the sitemap with custom frequency, priority, and lastmod.

changefreq, priority, and lastmod are hints, not directives. Search engines treat them as suggestions, so adjust sparingly.

Keeping a page out

The three noindex knobs are covered on the previous page, head and noindex: site-wide, per-page, and sitemap-only. The one that belongs here is the fourth, because it is a sitemap mechanic rather than a robots one:

sitemap:
  ignore: true
eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true

sitemap: { ignore: true } removes the page from the sitemap; the page still renders.
eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true keeps the page out of collections, and because the sitemap reads from collections, out of the sitemap too.

The second is the blunter instrument. Reach for it when the page should not appear in any listing, not just this one.

Drafts

Add draft: true in front matter:

draft: true

In dev (npm start): drafts render normally.
In any build: drafts are skipped. The switch is Eleventy's own ELEVENTY_RUN_MODE, which is build for anything that is not serving or watching, so a bare eleventy run with no --serve or --watch drops them too. This is not the ELEVENTY_ENV your build script sets; that one governs CSS minification and the navigator.
Baseline registers its own drafts preprocessor. If you already have one, yours wins; Baseline's is guarded against double-registration.

Run and inspect

npm start

Open pages normally.
Check dist/sitemap.xml while dev runs. It's emitted, drafts included.
Draft pages render in dev and show up in the dev sitemap. They drop out the moment you build rather than serve.

Production build

npm run build

Then inspect dist/sitemap.xml. Three things should be missing:

Pages with sitemap.ignore: true.
Every entry, if site-wide noindex: true is set.
Anything marked draft: true.

The <loc> entries are absolute, anchored to settings.url. If they come out relative, the origin never reached the build: deployment checks covers that.

Multilingual note

When multilingual is on, Baseline emits a per-language sitemap (/en/sitemap.xml, /nl/sitemap.xml, and so on) plus a sitemap index at the root. The per-page ignore, noindex, and draft rules apply to each entry just the same.

Next steps

Keep settings.url accurate in production, and set pathPrefix if you deploy under a subpath.
Use drafts freely for in-progress content. Just remember they reappear in dev.
Set defaults at the data layer: _data/sitemap.js for site-wide sitemap defaults, or directory data (e.g. posts.11tydata.js) to apply sitemap settings across a folder.