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

Location List Pagination

Field and mountains: Location List Pagination

Store Locator Plus® Late February 2026 Updates

The late-February 2026 maintenance window focused on stability and cleanup across the Store Locator Plus ecosystem—especially around Locations import UI reliability, continued PSR-12/PHP 8 compatibility cleanup, and some Google Maps loading improvements.

Release window covered in this post: February 19, 2026 through February 26, 2026.


Pagination Fixes

The most important fix for this release is addressing pagination for lists of locations. A feature available to Enterprise SaaS users and Premier subscription users is the ability to page location search results. This allows for a smaller list of locations to appear on the user-facing location search and map interface with standard next page, previous page buttons. The functionality stopped working at some point in the past. This was brought to our attention by our clients and has been patched in this release.


Locations Import: Fixes for “Broken Tabs / Corrupted Admin UI”

Another important fix in this window was addressing an issue where HTML output from the Import tab could become malformed and then “bleed” into other admin panels. In practice, that could cause subsequent tabs or sections to render incorrectly or behave unpredictably.

Updates included:

  • Fix for rogue/corrupt HTML output in the Locations import UI.
  • Hardening work in Power add-on import to prevent Import tab output from impacting adjacent tabs.

If you’ve ever seen the Locations admin screen behave strangely after viewing Import, this release is aimed squarely at eliminating that fragility.


Google Maps Loading Improvements (Async + Dependency Fix)

We continued improving how Google Maps assets are enqueued and loaded—especially for admin-side usage—so maps can load more efficiently while reducing edge-case failures.

Highlights include:

  • Async script loading support for Google Maps enqueues (including appropriate URL attributes).
  • Defensive checks to ensure required keys are present before attempting to enqueue certain map assets.
  • Dependency fix related to Google Maps script loading (to prevent mis-ordered enqueues or missing prerequisites).

This is part of an ongoing effort to make map loading more consistent across WordPress admin screens and reduce the “works on one screen but not another” class of problems.


Payments / Subscription Workflow Patch (MySLP)

On the MySLP Payments side, this window included a small but important stability fix to prevent a case where subscription detail retrieval could return a WP_Error unexpectedly (stemming from return declaration/typing cleanup work).

Net effect: fewer “mysterious” failures when subscription details are being fetched and surfaced in the UI.


Compatibility & Maintenance: PSR-12 / Cleanup / Version Bumps

As usual, there were a number of housekeeping improvements that help keep the codebase modern and easier to maintain:

  • PSR-12 and typing cleanup in several components (core + Premier).
  • Removal of unused methods/properties to reduce surface area and future confusion.
  • Version bumps across multiple plugins/add-ons as part of packaging these updates.

What You Need To Do

SaaS users (dashboard.storelocatorplus.com): nothing—these updates are part of ongoing platform maintenance work.

WordPress plugin users: if you are impacted by Locations Import UI oddities or admin rendering glitches, you’ll want to update to the latest Store Locator Plus / add-on releases that include the late-February fixes.

If you run into anything unexpected (especially around Imports or Google Maps loading), contact us—those reports are extremely helpful for prioritizing the next round of stability patches.

About This Article

This article was written by an AI agent and refined by a human.

The AI agent was running the openai-codex/gpt-5.2 model with deeper context hints provide by the Store Locator Plus® Qdrant database. The database evaluates the code changes, commit notes, and R&D documentation on our internal documentation site. It generates a basic summary of what changed since the last production release.

Image by Studio Lichtfang from Pixabay