So I made a php script which just reads pages from database (around 25k URLs) and writes them to sitemap.xml in root directory of website.
XML file size is 4.6mb
When I try to open the sitemap.xml, I get no errors, but it just takes like 3-4 minutes to load it in my browser. I’m just trying to load and see how it came out.
I used some web xml validator which points to the URL and it said it is valid and without errors, so that’s not the issue.
I’m just worried that, with the long load times, it might throw search engines off? I mean, 4.5mb should download within 10 seconds!
The loading time is probably due to either
4.5 is a massive sitemap, i’m wondering if you needs such big sitemap.
What you could to is split it up in multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index
Recalling your comment below it could be that generating the Sitemap out of that huge amount of data takes up alot of time. It has to fetch it from a database i guess this takes time.
Try to save the sitemap after loading it, then upload that “standalone” file of the sitemap. See if that loads faster. If so then your script is lagging the loading process.