Last issue was about the enquiries that never reach your inbox. This one is about the page a lot of those enquiries come from — the "where to find us" page — and the fact that the map on it is usually the heaviest thing you serve.

The problem isn't Google Maps. It's how map plugins get built. You want to show eight venues on a page, and the recommended solution installs an entire ecosystem: a custom post type, a page-builder dependency, ACF, a settings panel with 200 options, and a bundle of scripts loaded on every page of your site whether there's a map on it or not.

Then somebody asks you to add fifteen more locations, and you find out the only way in is one form at a time.

What a map plugin actually needs to do

Useful checklist even if you're staying with what you've got. Four things:

Geocode for you. You type the address, it fills in latitude and longitude. If you're pasting coordinates from a lookup site, the plugin is making you do its job.
Cluster pins. Any map with more than a dozen locations turns into an unreadable pile at low zoom unless nearby pins group together.
Filter by category. Visitors rarely want all your locations — they want the ones of a particular type, in their area. Coloured pins plus toggle chips do most of the work.
Bulk edit via CSV. Export, edit in a spreadsheet, re-import. Anything else means an afternoon of forms every time the list changes.

And it should place with a shortcode, so the map goes where you put it and nothing loads on pages that don't have one.

This week's fix

If the boxes above aren't ticked, changing map plugins is a genuinely small job — usually an hour, since the data is just addresses.

The one I built for this is Venue Map Pro — £29, one-time. It's shortcode-driven [venue_map], so you can drop several independent maps on the same page, and there's no page builder anywhere in it.

Address geocoding: type an address, click "Find coordinates", done.
Marker clustering so dense maps stay readable at low zoom.
Category filters and coloured pins, with filter chips visitors can toggle.
CSV import and export, with merge or replace on re-import.
One admin page for title, description, centre, zoom, height, API key, styling and the locations manager.
Map styles: standard, grey, silver, retro, night, aubergine, emerald and more, so it can look like your brand rather than like Google.
Hardened and developer-friendly: strict validation, nonce-protected endpoints, plain Settings API with no ACF dependency, and a vmp_map_data filter if you'd rather feed it from your own CPT.

It's aimed at venue, event, hospitality and multi-location businesses — the sites where the map is doing real commercial work rather than decorating a footer.

One thing to check while you're there

Whatever plugin you use, make sure the map isn't the only place your address lives. Search engines and AI assistants read text, not map tiles — so the full address, postcode and phone number should also be present as plain, crawlable text on the page, ideally with LocalBusiness schema. The map is for humans who already found you. The text is for the ones who haven't.

This issue lives in the archive, organised by topic. And the plugins page shows the repeatable workflows alongside the service work.

How we can work together

Reply with the page your map sits on and how many locations you're plotting, and I'll tell you whether a shortcode covers it.