Hello,
Thanks for contacting us, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
Gladly, you won’t need to pay extra to get assistance from us. We’ll do that for free!
You are encountering the issue because you have an XML declaration error on your sitemap.
This is usually caused by whitespace in your theme code that is breaking the sitemap generation. In your case, not only sitemap, but also for any other URLs on your site, the blank lines are added in the source code.
This might be added by a blank line/space in your wp-config.php file or your theme’s functions.php file. Here’s a link for more information:
https://rankmath.com/kb/fix-sitemap-issues/#xml-text-declaration
You can get in touch with your web host for assistance checking your website files for you.
Also, make sure your cache is disabled as it is highly likely that the cache is interfering with the working of Sitemap functionality of Rank Math.
Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
There are no space in the wp-config.php file or the theme’s functions.php file that is causing this.
Firefox browser STILL states:
XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: https://[mydomainname]/sitemap_index.xml
Line Number 2, Column 1:
While Opera browser states simply:
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 2 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
Deactivating plugins is not helping either.
Is there ANYONE whom I can turn to for help with this?
I’ve become frustrated enough to simply delete the entire folder including the WP installation and start all over again. But I would prefer a simpler fix IF it exists.
Thank you in advance,
Trish
Hello,
We might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.
Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.
It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/
You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
I FOUND IT… sorry Md. Sakib Khandaker, turned out to be the Clicky Analytics plugin that is causing this.
I will try deleting the plugin and upload a cleaner installation to see if that works.
If it does not fix this, then in which of the files do I look for the culprit?
Thanks HEAPS,
Trish
Hello,
We are super happy that this resolved your issue.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
