The January 2026 update is out for the Store Locator Plus® products and services. Both the SaaS platform and the WordPress plugins have been updated with a variety of bug fixes and user experience updates. We have been testing modernizing the administrative interfaces by replacing PHP code with newer React components. Part of the process is intended to modernize the user experience which goes hand-in-hand with making the Store Locator Plus® platform faster and more stable.
My Profile Interface Progress (SaaS)
Our primary work with the updated user interface has focused on the My Profile page. This is a low impact part of the application, meaning it has near-zero risk of changing how the map and directory presentations behave as deployed on websites. It has allowed use to test implementation of new JavaScript driven React components while improving data display and user interfaces. This has been a measured test of new interfaces.
This process has been laying the groundwork for better interfaces across the application that we intend to roll out throughout the year. Eventually we expect to have a newer, faster, and more modern design not only on the administrative interface but also to make it easier to provide modern interfaces for user-facing map and directory designs with little-to-no coding experience for our user base.
This update includes a basic React-driven interface that employs expansion panels and information cards in scroll panels. We hope this makes it easier to read and understand the account history and invoices. These interfaces will be refined to define a consistent style before being deployed across the application for things like location management and settings interfaces. While the current interface updates focus primarily on functionality and clean data presentation, we will be working with a design team in the near future to apply modern design themes across the application.
Logging Referer Site Links (SaaS)
One of the features that has always been part of the SaaS platform is providing a summary list of all site URLs where your Store Locator Plus® map or directory is deployed. This appears under the My Profile section when logged into the SaaS platform. A minor bug in the referrer tracking system was causing some URLs would not be tracked properly. This has been resolved to ensure all URLs are listed properly.
Results and Search Layout Patches (SaaS, WordPress Plugins)
A bug fix related to the layout settings available on Professional and Enterprise accounts addresses an issue with the Search Box Title and Results Title settings among others. An update in late 2024 was forcing these layout settings to always adopt the default values for those elements. On the user-facing embedded maps the titles were rendered with the default text. If you changed the Results Box Title to something like “Agency List” versus the default value of “Locations” it would not render the updated title on the display.
This patch has resolved that issue and those features are once again fully functional. This has been deployed to the SaaS production platform, no action is necessary for our SaaS users.
For WordPress users with the Experience or Premier plugin, you will need to update to the latest version of those plugins to employ these patches.
SEO Pages / Store Pages (WordPress)
For users of the WordPress plugin that utilize the SEO Pages feature, multiple patches have been made to address the changes made in newer versions of WordPress. Changes over the past 18 months in WordPress, especially in the 6.x releases, changed how custom page types and taxonomies worked. The changes were subtle but did impact how Store Pages were created and reviewed. Several patches were employed over the past month to address those changes and ensure continued support of this feature for our WordPress users.
We have investigated employing this feature on the SaaS platform now that many search engines read JavaScript provided HTML rendering as part of their site indexing. While we have made several attempts to make this a viable feature, we are not seeing engagement from our SaaS user base for this feature. If this is something you’d like to take advantage of as part of our SaaS offering, please use the contact us form and let use know. If there is enough interest in this feature we will put this on the development schedule.
Featured post image by LeoVullings from Pixabay