How to Implement an Image Sitemap in Webflow for Better SEO

Publishing help SEO
1

I’m looking to implement an Image Sitemap on my Webflow website to improve image indexing and SEO. Could someone provide a step-by-step guide for this? Any best practices or tools for generating and submitting the sitemap would also be helpful.

I would appreciate any helpful tips!

3

Hi Nensi,

You can create any XML sitemap you want manually, but you’d also have to update it manually.

There’s no mechanic to add these to Webflow’s auto-generated sitemaps.
In theory you could achieve this by building a reverse proxy, however it would be difficult to source your list of image URLs.

6

Here’s How I’d Handle Image Sitemaps in Webflow

Nensi, since Webflow doesn’t support native image sitemaps, here’s exactly how I implement them for clients when image SEO matters:

  1. I start by crawling the site using Screaming Frog to extract all valuable image URLs, main visuals, product shots, blog images. I skip anything decorative or lazy-loaded via CSS.
  2. I build the image sitemap manually using proper XML structure. It looks like this:
<url>
  <loc>https://yourdomain. com/page</loc>
  <image:image>
    <image:loc>https://yourdomain. com/images/filename.jpg</image:loc>
  </image:image>
</url>

If I’m short on time, I’ll use XML-Sitemaps. com, but for precision, I prefer hand-editing it—especially when optimizing captions or filenames.
3. Since Webflow doesn’t let me upload XML files, I host the sitemap externally—usually on GitHub Pages or Netlify.
4. I then add the sitemap link to Webflow’s robots.txt inside Site Settings → SEO. I include:

Sitemap: https://yourhost. com/image-sitemap.xml
  1. I submit it in Google Search Console and monitor how images are getting indexed over time.

When I do this, I also make sure:

  • Every image has relevant alt text and a clean filename
  • The sitemap is kept updated with new content
  • File sizes and formats (like WebP / avif) are optimized for speed and quality
  • Structured data is used if the images are tied to products, articles, or other rich content

Let me know if you want help building the XML file or hosting it somewhere simple. I’ve done this across dozens of Webflow setups, it’s a small effort with big impact if done right.