Quick Fix: WordPress SEO by Yoast sitemap_index.xml giving blank page

Quick Fix: WordPress SEO by Yoast sitemap_index.xml giving blank page

After the latest somewhat recent update made to Yoast’s WordPress SEO I have had issues with my sitemap. If I do a view source on the blank page that shows up now when I open my sitemap I can see the XML and it is formatted correctly… so why is the page showing up blank?

Well, the answer was easy: The XSL that formats how that XML is going to display on the browser is not being found by the web browser. Maybe there is something misconfigured but from reading around the web a lot of people are having this issue and it looks like there are a number of workaround to it.

In my particular case I did a symbolic link from the style sheet found on the WordPress SEO’s plugin folder to my root home folder. I realize this is probably not how our friend Joost de Valk envisioned it but for now it does the trick, its quick, and because it is a symbolic link if there is an update it should get it too (vs simply copying the file over).

By the way, I read W3TC (W3 Total Cache) was causing this issue, but after disabling all the option and even the plugin itself I still have this issue.

In order to perform this quick walk around here are the steps:

I. Verify you have the XML style sheet in your installation:

/www.CloudIngenium.com/wwwroot/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/css/xml-sitemap.xsl

II. Create a symbolic link:

ln -s /www.CloudIngenium.com/wwwroot/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo/css/xml-sitemap.xsl /www.CloudIngenium.com/wwwroot/main-sitemap.xsl

III. And finally: Open your XML sitemap and see if it works now:

http://kx.cloudingenium.com/sitemap_index.xml

I am guessing a fix for this should come up in the next few months as people work to identify the underlying issue, but in the meantime this seems like a viable workaround and hopefully it won’t break anything in the future. Remember, you can always remove a symbolic link if this issue is fix later on in time. Imagine you had made a symbolic link using the same file name as the one in the plugin’s css folder “xml-sitema.xsl”. To remove it simply execute the following command:

unlink /www.CloudIngenium.com/wwwroot/xml-sitemap.xsl