Submit sitemap to Google search console
Sitemap is a raw text/html/xml file that provides links to all the pages including the structure so the search engine bots can crawl and index your site. Also it helps bots learn about your site more easily. If there is no sitemap available then bots manually crawl pages and do the work themselves.
If you install Yoast SEO plugin it creates sitemap like this automatically. You just need to login to your Google site manager and go to “sitemap” section and submit your sitemap once.
The basic version of Sitemap just used to be sitemap.xml but now the improved versions are sitemap_index.xml file which includes sitemaps in various other classifications like sitemaps for posts, pages, categories, tags etc.
Example site map here
By default all sitemaps are created, you can go to Yoast settings and disable tags, categories, pages however you think, but posts should be there.
In my cases I think categories could help search engines understand my site, so I have both posts and categories sitemap. Since I don’t have unique content in pages, I excluded pages sitemap.
To exclude from sitemap, login to Yoast plugin settings, select pages or categories and switch the toggle off, that says “include in search results”