Gzipped vs Plain Sitemap: Compress Above This Size

Gzipped vs Plain Sitemap: Compress Above This Size

Google accepts .xml.gz. Decide by file size, not preference.

Serve plain .xml when:
— File is under ~1MB. Compression savings are trivial; plain is easier to eyeball and debug.

Serve .xml.gz when:
— File approaches the 50MB uncompressed limit (the 50MB cap is measured uncompressed — gzip does NOT raise it).
— You're serving many large child files and want to cut bandwidth on repeat crawls.

Common mistake: assuming gzip lets you exceed 50MB. It does not. Both gzipped and plain files must be ✅ under 50MB uncompressed and ✅ under 50,000 URLs.

Pass/fail:
— ✅ Content-Encoding header is correct for .gz files.
— ✅ The .gz extension matches actual gzip content (mislabeled files fail parsing).

Definition of done: large files compressed, headers correct, limits respected uncompressed.