What is this error message?

If you already have the files sitemap.xml and (if you have gzip enabled in Simple Google Sitemap) sitemap.xml.gz in the root directory of your WordPress installation, try deleting them and create new empty files with the correct permissions for that plugin, then manually run the sitemap generator. If these files don’t exist, try creating the files.

Here’s how I would do it:

  1. Make sure sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz don’t exist in the root directory of your WordPress installation. If they do, delete them with rm sitemap.xml and rm sitemap.xml.gz over SSH, or just delete them through your FTP client of choice.

  2. Create two new blank instances of these files. Over SSH: touch sitemap.xml and touch sitemap.xml.gz. If you’re doing this over FTP (I’ll use WinSCP in this example, it’s free), navigate to your root WordPress directory, right click, select New –> File and type sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz, respectively.

  3. Set the file permissions of these files. I’d try 755 to start, but there may be a recommended value somewhere in this plugin’s documentation. Over SSH: chmod 755 sitemap.xml and chmod 755 sitemap.xml.gz. If you’re using FTP with WinSCP, right click the files, select Properties, and set the value of Octal to 0755 for each.

  4. In the Simple Google Sitemap settings (it’s listed as XML-Sitemap in the WordPress settings menu), click the link “rebuild the sitemap” and see if it can now generate the sitemaps.

If I was to take a guess, I’d say both of those files don’t exist right now and the Simple XML Sitemap plugin doesn’t have permissions to create new files on your web server. Please let me know how it goes.

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