Xml sitemap only shows up sometimes (magento)

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Moz community,

I'm using Magento platform. I can generate a sitemap using their xml generator, but it will only pull up sometimes in web explorers, the rest of the time it will show a 404 page.

GWT also tells me that I get a 404 error when testing the sitemap, but sometimes it will acknowledge that it's there. Anyone had this problem before or know how to help. sitemap= www.ice.com/sitemap.xml

Let me know what other information I can provide to help.

Thanks!

[LesleyPaone]

Can you verify if the file is actually on the server? It sounds like the sitemap generator you are using might have a problem. How many products are in the shop? How long does it run when you generate one?

[IceIcebaby]

It doesn't seem like the file is on the server, but I'm using the Magento sitemap generator which is supposed to automatically add it to the main directory. We just migrated our site from one Magento dev team to another so could this mean that our servers were switched over from Magento to a new one?

We've got ~40,000 total products and ~16,000-17,000 in-stock products.

It hardly takes any time to generate when I run it through Magento, maybe a minute at most. I've also tested out generators like Auditmypc.com (which has worked for every site except this one) and xml-sitemaps.com.

[LesleyPaone]

It very well could. It seems like the generation time is too short for that many products. One thing I would try (I am not an expert with Magento) is to check what your php execution time limit is. If it is 30 seconds or 1 minute, I would try to increase it to something like 5 or 10 minutes and see if the regeneration works then. The script could be timing out.

[IceIcebaby]

Yeah that's definitely an issue we've had in the past (php execution time). It times out so quick for loading anything.

Hopefully it's just a server switch issue that we can upload directly as our robots.txt and sitemap.html aren't showing up either.

Thanks for leading me in the right direction. Very helpful.