August ’26 Locator Style Refresh

We’ve been working on refreshing the existing Locator Styles as part of our 2026 user interface design refresh. Locator Styles provide preset user interface designs for the public-facing side of Store Locator Plus®. The styles provide an easy way to generate a new look for what your customers see on your website when looking for places you sell your wares or provide services.

Our Locator Styles worked well when they were crafted five or six years ago, but they need a refresh to meet today’s interface design standards. We’ve started working through our catalog of pre-defined styles with refreshes that work better with modern themes on WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Shopify and other web presence solutions. The first round of refreshes it meant to upgrade the most popular styles while provide as much backwards compatibility with older web themes.

The good news it that the updated styles are not implemented automatically even if your Store Locator Plus® installation is using one of the Locator Styles we have updated. To try out the revised version of a style you need to select a new style and activate it via the Style Manager in Store Locator Plus® or reload the style if it is already active on your site. With activating a new style or reloading the current style no changes will be made to your installation.

Our revisions for early August 2026 include the Default, Bobbitt, and Bennet locator styles. These updates are now online for most users.


Default Locator Style

The Default locator style is the style that is the default layout everyone starts with. This is designed to change multiple settings back to their initial configuration and provide generic styling that inherits or works alongside multiple web presence themes.

This is the basic layout for Store Locator Plus®.  It allows default browser and website themes to dictate the element styling. It has settings that take advantage of Enterprise and Professional level features.

SubscriptionSettings Changed
AdvancedCSS settings, General locator layout
Search layout, Search category dropdown style
Results layout
Map layout, Map info bubble layout
Professionalplus…
Location categories
Search form style, Search by name, Category selection
Results header, Prevent result listing wrap, Paginate results, Show country hours and phone, Category icons on results
Map styling, hide home marker, map width, map height
Enterpriseplus…
Search box placeholder text
Map cluster markers, Google map style, map loading indicator

Bennett Locator Style

Bennett locator style, August 2026 revisions as seen in SaaS Preview mode


The Bennett locator style was created years ago for a client with a specific user interface design requested to blend with their website.

Search: Designed to search by category, city, state, tags or the dealer name versus the standard address or zip centric search.
Presents the category options as clickable buttons. City and State selectors are via a drop down selection. Tag search and dealer name is a text input.
Displays a reset search button to back to the original search with no filters.

Results: Presented as a 4-column design with name, country, phone, and website as the primary output.
Gray highlight on hover over location.
Light yellow highlight for featured locations.

This theme has been designed to work best with Enterprise subscriptions as it uses cluster markers, table layouts, and scroll map into view features. Category buttons, column result layouts, and other elements require Professional or Enterprise subscriptions.


Bobbitt Locator Style

The Bobbitt style was another customer request.

A yellow color scheme with a simplified search interface.
Does NOT show an address search.
Focus is on searching by name (if enabled), tags, categories, city, and state.

Results layout shows only the name, address and directions.

Location details are in the map info bubble.

This theme has been designed to work best with Enterprise subscriptions as it uses category search, tag search, city search, and state search features.


More updates are planned for our two-dozen-plus locator styles throughout the remainder of the year. We are also working on creating more advanced interactive styles that go beyond simple layout and styling. Check the Style menu and click the “New…Old” button on the top right of the style stack to see what updates we’ve released most recently.

Note: WordPress users will want to backup their installation to ensure they can recover any settings that may be changed when trying out new styles. SaaS users can review the Settings History to review what was changed and copy settings back as needed. We are working on a “restore previous setting” feature in Settings History to make this easier in the future. Contact us if you need assistance restoring your SaaS styling.

Store Locator Plus® July 2026 Updates: Faster Location Management and Cleaner Admin Tools

Work continues to modernize the Store Locator Plus® user experience. The latest round of updates focused primarily on the Location Management table header. Location management updates include an improved tab bar along with improved bulk actions, filter, and search components.

These updates were made in preparation for a complete rework of the locations management table. The reworked table will significantly improve location searches, filters, and other tools that assist our clients with location lists that include hundreds or thousands of locations. Those releases are expected in our Summer 2026 update.

Manage Location Interface Updates

July 2026 location management action bar UX improvements (all users).

The latest Store Locator Plus® updates continue the work of modernizing the location management experience for SaaS customers and WordPress plugin users. This release window focused on the Manage Locations screen, especially the tools store owners use every day: bulk actions, search, filters, category updates, import/export workflows, and clearer in-admin feedback.

The updated tag locations modal (Professional and Enterprise users).

For customers with large location directories, the biggest improvement is a more responsive and easier-to-use admin workflow. The location list controls are being moved into the newer React-based interface, giving the page a cleaner layout while preserving the existing Store Locator Plus behavior that site owners already rely on.

SaaS Updates

The hosted Store Locator Plus® dashboard received shared interface updates that improve button styling and visual consistency across React-based admin screens. These refinements help keep action buttons readable and consistent even on screens that still include older WordPress admin styling.

The SaaS dashboard components were rebuilt against the updated shared interface library. This is mostly behind-the-scenes work, but it supports a more consistent customer dashboard as more account, profile, and location management screens move to the newer interface framework.

Testing and development environments were also updated for newer WordPress compatibility, helping keep the hosted platform aligned with upcoming WordPress changes.

WordPress Plugin Updates

The Store Locator Plus® base plugin updates in this window focused heavily on the Manage Locations screen. The bulk actions, search box, and location filter controls have moved into React-based components while still using the existing backend processing paths. That keeps the customer-facing behavior stable while improving the admin interface.

The Power add-on was updated to work with the new React location management controls. Location filters, import processing, export behavior, hosted CSV options, and category-related actions were adjusted so they continue to work cleanly with the updated admin layout.

The Experience add-on received compatibility updates for the revised bulk action wording and location management controls.

The Premier add-on received a settings message clarification, making the Premier Options guidance easier to understand in the WordPress admin.

For WordPress plugin users, the relevant versions from this release window are Store Locator Plus® 2607.11.01, Power 2607.11.01, Experience 2607.04.01, and Premier 2606.26.01. The Store Locator Plus® base plugin now requires PHP 8.2 or newer.

Admin and Interface Refinements

The Manage Locations screen has a cleaner action bar with modernized bulk action controls. Tagging and categorizing locations now use clearer modal and drawer interfaces, with improved action button layout and better feedback while processing.

Search has been moved into the new header area and continues to use the established Store Locator Plus search behavior. This keeps the workflow familiar while reducing older PHP-generated interface code.

The updated location filter notification interface.

Filters now use a slide-out drawer and active filter indicators. When a filter is applied, the active filter state is shown more clearly so administrators can see what is limiting the current list. Property filters can show details such as name, ZIP/postal code, state, country, and category selections.

The updated location filter interface (Professional and Enterprise accounts).

Filtered searches that return no matching locations now keep the action bar available. This is important because it lets administrators adjust or clear filters instead of getting stuck on an empty result view.

Bulk action progress feedback has also been improved. Actions now show clearer processing indicators, and apply buttons are disabled when they cannot safely act on the current result set.

Fixes and Stability Improvements

Several older location management scripts and unused admin UI paths were removed after the new React controls replaced them. This reduces duplicate logic and lowers the chance of old interface code interfering with current behavior.

Power import handling was updated so import-related scripts load when the Locations tab is available, not only after a specific tab click. This makes import workflows more reliable in the updated admin interface.

A Power categorization issue that could interfere with other JavaScript on the Manage Locations screen was fixed.

The updated Categorize locations interface (Professional and Enterprise accounts).

Unused JavaScript libraries and older table sorting assets were removed from Power where WordPress core or the newer interface no longer needs them.

The Store Locator Plus® base plugin and related add-ons received maintenance cleanup, including PHP compatibility updates, PSR-12 cleanup, dependency simplification, and removal of unused generated assets.

What You Need To Do

Store Locator Plus® SaaS customers do not need to install anything. The hosted service is updated automatically.

WordPress plugin users should update the Store Locator Plus® base plugin and any active add-ons together. If you use Power, Experience, or Premier, update those add-ons at the same time as the base plugin to keep the Manage Locations tools aligned.

Before updating a production WordPress site, confirm that your hosting account is running PHP 8.2 or newer. If your site is still on an older PHP version, update PHP first or ask your hosting provider to move the site to a current PHP release.

As always, test updates on a staging copy first if your site has custom integrations, large location imports, or custom admin workflows.

Store Locator Plus® May Updates

Several minor updates have been made to the Store Locator Plus® application that was released this week. As always, our SaaS platform users do not need to do anything to receive the updates.

WordPress users will need to manually download and install the Store Locator Plus® base plugin to get updates since the WordPress plugin directory is not properly distributing updates at this time. Once upgrading to the latest version, the main Store Locator Plus® plugin will route directly to our update servers and start receiving inline updates (no manual download zip file, activate process).

The following items are included in this update…

Store Locator Plus® WordPress Plugin Updates

As noted in the opening of this article, the main Store Locator Plus® plugin for WordPress now pulls updated directly from our official update server. If you are on a version older than 2604.06.01, you will need to login to your our WordPress plugin store and manually download then install the new version. Note: Our SaaS platform users do NOT need to do this, head on over to the Store Locator Plus® Dashboard and login.

Make sure your .zip file does NOT have a different name as that can confuse WordPress. The file name should be store-locator-plus.zip. If you end up with store-locator-plus-2.zip (or any other version), WordPress will install multiple copies of the plugin as it assumes the prefix before the .zip extension is a unique plugin name. Not our design, that is legacy WordPress for you.

Another reason to think about replacing your self-managed WordPress plugin install with our fully managed SaaS version. (As an added incentive – we have more features coming to SaaS only with plans for better user interaction reports coming for all plan levels , joining our Settings History feature that was added for all SaaS users in Q4 2025.)

Google Map Domains (Country Codes)

In one of our recent updates, we extended the list of country codes that are supported to match the full list of 100+ countries available on Google Maps today. Two things happened with that update which we missed on release which are now fixed.

First – our Map Domain (country) selection was ordered by country codes (the 2-letter code assigned to each country) which did NOT match the order of the text displayed on the drop down menu. That meant that “United Kingdom” with a NEW country code of “gb” appeared in the middle of the “Gs” on our list. That’s not right! Easy fix to sort our dropdown list by displayed text not country codes. This was a non-functional change but makes the user experience work as expected.

Speaking of United Kingdom, apparently in the ancient history of the Google Map Domains there was an alternative country code of “uk” versus the standardized code of “gb”. Apparently Google Maps stopped supporting “uk” as a country code, which meant that any of our users that had “United Kingdom” selected as their map domain started having issues. Their country code of “uk” was not longer found, and Google did the obvious thing… use the first country code on the list of “Ascension Islands” to try to show the map and addresses. In the most recent update, Store Locator Plus® will automatically convert anyone with the “uk” code to the “gb” code on first launch of the plugin. SaaS user accounts have already been recitified.

Google Maps Latitude/Longitude Links

Another minor update related to Google and the map interface is the link in Location Details. Under each location is the latitude and longitude of the location. Google changed their map search URL which resulted in those links bringing up a 404 page. This has been resolved and once again show the location on a separate Google Maps window. This allows for a quick sanity check that the encoded latitude and longitude align with the Google Maps public service.

Image by Lance Cleveland from Pixabay