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® 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

Store Locator Plus® Spring 2026 Release Notes: Maps, Profiles, and Plugin Updates

Store Locator Plus® Spring 2026 Updates for SaaS and WordPress

We’ve rolled out a new round of updates across the Store Locator Plus® platform covering both our SaaS offering and WordPress plugins. This release window focused on improving map compatibility, cleaning up modern React-based admin experiences, refining subscription behavior, and tightening up several WordPress compatibility details.

If you are a SaaS customer, these improvements are already part of the hosted platform. If you use the WordPress plugins, updating to the latest releases will ensure you get the newest fixes and compatibility improvements.

SaaS Updates

The SaaS platform saw continued work on modernizing account and profile management screens.

My Profile improvements continued during this release window, including updates to the React-based interface and fixes that help components bind more consistently and behave more predictably. We also refined account-status handling so customers with a canceled subscription that still has time remaining are not shown as expired too early.

Subscription and billing workflows also received an important reliability update. Renewals now better respect the remaining active term on subscriptions that were canceled but not yet fully expired. In practice, this helps avoid starting a replacement subscription too early and makes account transitions cleaner.

We also added additional testing hooks and continued internal UI cleanup work around profile-related screens. These updates help us keep improving the SaaS dashboard while moving more of the administrative experience toward faster, more maintainable React-based interfaces.

SaaS highlights:

  • Continued improvements to the React-based My Profile experience
  • Better account-status handling for canceled subscriptions that still have time remaining
  • Subscription renewal timing improvements for not-yet-expired canceled plans
  • Additional internal UI/testing improvements to support ongoing dashboard modernization

WordPress Plugin Updates

All WordPress plugin updates are automatically part of the SaaS platform updates.

For WordPress plugin users, this release included several map and compatibility improvements across the main plugin and add-ons.

A major focus in this window was Google Maps compatibility. Store Locator Plus®, Premier, and Power all received updates related to Google’s newer Advanced Marker system. These changes were followed by additional patches to make marker behavior more reliable across admin and front-end experiences. The goal here is simple: keep maps working smoothly as the Google Maps platform evolves.

We also improved how Google Maps assets are loaded and configured. That includes refinements to script enqueue behavior, updates to map-related dependencies, and better handling of map domain and country support settings. These changes help reduce edge-case failures and improve consistency across different WordPress environments.

Another useful WordPress improvement in this cycle was expanded Google Maps country support. The country list was updated to reflect a much broader set of supported countries, helping site owners working in more regions configure maps more accurately.

WordPress highlights:

  • Google Maps Advanced Marker compatibility updates across core and add-ons
  • Follow-up patches to improve marker stability and map behavior
  • Improved Google Maps loading and dependency handling
  • Expanded country support for Google Maps configuration
  • React admin rendering updates to reduce deprecation issues
  • Premier map fallback fixes and general maintenance cleanup

Admin and Interface Refinements

This release also continued our effort to modernize older admin interfaces.

In the WordPress plugin stack, some React-powered administrative modules were updated to use newer rendering patterns. That reduces deprecation warnings and helps keep the codebase aligned with newer WordPress and React expectations.

On the SaaS side, we continued that same modernization path in customer-facing admin screens. While much of this work is structural, the user-facing benefit is a more consistent and reliable dashboard experience over time.

Fixes and Stability Improvements

Several smaller but meaningful fixes also landed in this release window.

For Store Locator Plus® core, we improved script enqueue handling to better account for edge cases in WordPress behavior. We also resolved issues around incorrect script registration timing and cleaned up related loading logic.

For Premier, a center-map fallback setting issue was fixed, helping map displays behave more consistently when certain location or viewport data is unavailable.

Across the codebase, we also completed compatibility and maintenance work such as PHPDoc cleanup, versioning updates, and dependency refreshes. These changes are mostly behind the scenes, but they help us keep the products stable and easier to maintain as WordPress, React, and Google Maps continue to change.

What You Need To Do

SaaS customers do not need to do anything. These updates are already part of the hosted platform.

WordPress plugin users should update the core Store Locator Plus® plugin and any active add-ons, especially if you rely on advanced map behavior, Premier pagination and map features, or Power reporting/admin tools.

As always, if you spot anything unexpected after updating, please reach out through our contact form. Real-world usage reports help us prioritize the next round of improvements.

Image by piviso from Pixabay