Google and Bing recommend that WordPress users upgrade to version 6.5, which natively supports lastmod dates in the sitemap files. In fact, Fabrice Canel from Bing says this is a “game-changer.”

Gary Illyes from Google posted on LinkedIn saying, “The lastmod element in sitemaps is a signal that can help crawlers figure out how often to crawl your pages. If you’re on WordPress, since version 6.5, you have this field natively populated for you thanks to Pascal Birchler and the WordPress developer community.”

Last year, Microsoft Bing said the lastmod date is critical and then Google said only provide the lastmod date if there is something new with that piece of content. In short, don’t just say the page was updated when it was not.

Fabrice Canel from Bing wrote:

Gary Illyes from Google added:

I do not use WordPress, so I will schedule in to have my developers here add the lastmod date to my sitemap, at some point.

I should note that Google use to ignore the lastmod but Gary said this morning, “yeah, surprisingly things may change given enough time.”

This is probably one step towards his mission to crawl less.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.