Do I need a sitemap for my website?

The answer

A sitemap is not mandatory, but it can help. Google says a sitemap can improve crawling of larger or more complex sites, new sites with few external links and sites with video, image or news content. It describes a site of about 500 pages or fewer as small, where a sitemap is less necessary if the pages are well linked internally. A sitemap does not guarantee crawling or indexing. Submitting it in Search Console is common practice.