Are there any potential problems associated with a homepage being left out of a sitemap?

[thejamstr]

Ouch – leaving the homepage out could potentially make it hard for search engines to find it. And since the homepage often has a ton of links on it, those pages might not get crawled, indexed, and or ranked either.

[superminingbros]

You must be using a really crappy CMS. 🤷🏼‍♂️

[Strong_Teaching8548]

while google can find your homepage anyway (it’s usually the most linked page), leaving it out of your sitemap is kinda shooting yourself in the foot

the main issue is you’re missing out on crawl efficiency signals. if your homepage isn’t listed, google doesn’t get that priority signal, and you lose a chance to communicate your site structure. plus, if you ever update your homepage frequently, google won’t know through the sitemap

definitely worth configuring your cms to include it or manually adding it if you can. it’s a small thing but compounds over time 🙂

[LockSecure7662]

It absolutely doesn’t matter if your sitemap doesn’t include the homepage. Google found and indexed your homepage a long time ago and it will keep crawling it regularly anyway, since you almost certainly have links to it somewhere on your site (like in breadcrumbs, your logo, or elsewhere).
Now here’s the most important part: Google uses sitemaps primarily to discover new pages. Unfortunately, in practice, search bots often don’t re-crawl or update existing pages just because they’re listed in the sitemap even if you’ve specified the proper change frequency or priority rules.

[j_on]

No problem. It won’t matter one bit.

To anyone saying Google will crawl it less or have problems finding it: It’s the fucking homepage. Google will crawl it pretty much no matter what. It’s usually the page with the most internal and external links to it. Plus Google will very likely try to crawl the homepage anyway because it’s expected to exist. After Google has found it (which they certainly will), they’ll keep crawling it anyway.

[WebLinkr]

Not really, this isn’t how sitemaps or crawling works.

You can totally leave it out

[Nyodrax]

Yes. You risk it not being crawled by search engines.

Include all of your websites indexable pages in your sitemap to ensure they are found.

That said, Google probably knows it’s there anyway. Not really a problem, but sub optimal to be sure.

[Nyodrax]

You may be using a CMS that duplicates the homepage and places it on domain(.)com/home — you should be able to manually resolve this though. What’s the CMS?