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I'm wondering whether it's worth the effort to create a sitemap for a single-page site.

By single page I'm not talking about a webapp made with Angular or Backbone, just a presentation site/page which has navigation links that link to sections within that particular page.

For example:

<a href="#aboutus">About Us</a>
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I'm assuming you're referring to an XML Sitemap? If so, then no - the sole purpose of an XML sitemap is to facilitate in the discovery (for indexation) of URLs/Pages. So if you only have one page, then there's no point. If you're worried about being found by search engines, you can either link to your page (from another site, or a twitter/Google+ page), register your domain with webmaster tools (either Bing or Google).

On the off-chance you were referring to an HTML sitemap, then no - your single-page site becomes a two page site, and you only have internal fragment (hash) links on your main-page anyway.

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  • I agree, but there's a point: how could you inform Google about the crawling rate without a sitemap?
    – user47243
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 11:39
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    You would usually inform Google about the crawl rate with robots.txt or through you Google Webmaster Tools account. A sitemap has no crawl rate controls. For a single page site, it isn't going to matter anyway. Googlebot isn't going to fetch a single page frequently enough to put any sort of load on your server.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 11:54
  • Yet some sources advise on having a sitemap.xml for SPAs even if they refer to <article> blocks within the single page. kruschecompany.com/…
    – Trunk
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 17:51
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There's an exception here, and that's if you have videos on your site.

You can create a separate sitemap just for video, or you can embed a video sitemap within an existing sitemap, whichever is more convenient for you.

The same can be said for for images and news if applicable.

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SiteMaps for Single Page Webs

Using CSS to place images and html objects inside DIV tags with invisible overflow containers allows us to make super web sites with many pages inside of a single HTML file. Draw a diagram showing how each anchor link inside your super page. Treat each anchor link as a separate HTML document in the diagram, because that area of your html document represents one full page. Submit your site map to bing.com and google.com as an XML document. Some of the most sophisticated designs are now being implemented into a single html file, a CSS document, and a simple PHP form validation script. I have seen web sites that use only one html file for massive sites that contain a lot of information.

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