where it says you can go into the page’s SEO settings
“2. Set priority and change frequency: Webflow allows you to define the priority and change frequency of individual pages in the sitemap. By accessing the page settings and navigating to the “SEO” tab, you can set the priority and frequency to accurately reflect the importance and update frequency of each page. This helps search engines understand which pages to prioritize and crawl more frequently, reducing the chances of incorrect URLs showing up in the sitemap.”
However inside my pages I don’t see these options at all to help set priority of page, or exclude it.
The alternative is manually creating a new sitemap each time the site updates, but this is not really feasible.
That page is whacked. Best to ignore it, might be a GPT hallucination?
But at least on standard non-Enterprise plans, there is no option to set priority or change frequency in Webflow’s auto-generated sitemap.
The next item in that article, conditional visibility… equally nonsensical.
There are realistically only 3 options if you want a custom sitemap.
Generate a custom one yourself, and keep updating it.
Arrange alternative hosting for your site, and write the code needed to generate one more dynamically in a self-hosted site
Use a reverse proxy to read Webflow’s auto-gen sitemap and modify it accordingly…
I use approach #3 a lot particularly when I’m creating special SEO-friendly paths like /usa/chicago/illinois/pizza-shops that the CMS cannot handle. For priority and page frequency, you could probably simplify that by establishing path-based rules, like;
Homepage has these settings
/blog/* pages have these other settings
All other pages have a third set of settings
It’s also possible to store that data in the CMS, and emit it on a hidden page which gets parsed and rewritten into CMS-item-specific data, but that’s a fair bit of setup.
The main thing to research first however is whether this will actually improve anything in your SEO world. Most recent references I’ve seen suggest that Google ignores these because they’re abused too often, much like META keywords.
The quest goes on, but #3 is a good solution thank you. I’m a coding newb so it did go a bit over my head but at least i can guide someone towards the right direction now.
But also, wtf Webflow! Makes me regret not using WP tbh