Location Search Results Patched In Store Locator Plus® v2503.06

Store Locator Plus® has two settings related to how many locations are returned when displaying a map. The first setting “Number To Show Initially” is the setting that determines how many locations will be shown when the map first renders. The locations are typically the first n-locations that are closest to the center point of the map unless other setting are adjusted to do something different. The second is the “Number To Show” after a search. This is the maximum number of locations that will be returned when a user enters and address and searches for locations.

Somewhere along the way the location search results settings got muddled and often the number of locations to be shown after a search was ignored. Instead the “Number To Show Initially” was used for both settings. We are not sure exactly when the behavior changed, likely during a huge thousand-lines-of-code update forced upon us by the folks at the WordPress Plugin Directory in the name of “security patches” (don’t even get me started on that topic). Regardless, an attentive user reported the problem along with the steps to reproduce the errant behavior. We were able to issue a patch for that issue and roll it into our March 2025 update on the SaaS platform (plugin users are also impacted).

Locator Performance and Category Improvements

Store Locator Plus® was recently updated to further improve the performance of the application. In addition the user experience for location categories has been updated, addressing shortcomings in the category legend rendering methodology.

Performance Improvements

After implementing security patches requested by the plugin management team over at WordPress.com, we noticed several administrative pages on our plugin as well as on our SaaS service were running slower than usual. After an extensive performance analysis of the underlying code, we were able to isolate the change and improve performance of that module by several orders of magnitude, saving up to 15 seconds per locator settings page request.

Time to execute the subquery improved from approximately 11 seconds to < 1 second. Memory consumption for that routine dropped from 5.4MB / request to 1MB / request.

Store Locator Plus® performance and category improvements.