I suggest creating a staging site so you can fully debug what’s going on.
The theme itself isn’t aware of any sitemap.xml, so it can’t cause any redirects or 404s.
The fact that sitemap.xml
is redirecting to sitemaps.xml
tells me there’s a redirect happening. Redirects can happen on the server side of things (.htaccess file, nginx configuration file etc..), or they can be done inside plugins using wp_redirect()
.
Is there a physical sitemap.xml file in the root of your website?