Hiding/Showing map pins on map load

You would be surprised at the diversity of opinions among our customers on whether or not a store locator map should start with all the pins loaded on the map, or start with a blank map, and then show map markers after a search is completed.

Some of our customers prefer to load all the pins and give their visitors an overview of all their retail locations. Others prefer to hide their distribution list from their competitors. Trying to strike a balance, Storemapper has a few built in rules around this.

1. By default Storemapper will show map pins on load

When you first add stores and select “save”, all your added locations will automatically show on the map (unless the amount of pins are over 1500 and then they will be hidden for performance purposes).

2. You can set the map to hide map pins initially and only show them AFTER a search has been made

From the Settings tab on the left hand panel, select General and scroll down to Behaviour. Here, you can set Show Locations to “No” if you prefer that your map pins do not show on initial map load. Instead the map will be blank and a limited number of map pins will load AFTER the search.

3. By default, maps with over 1,500 locations are hidden on initial load. Set this to “Off” to override this behavior.

There is a well known issue with the maps API that if you try to load too many markers on a map it can crash the user’s browser, especially on mobile devices. We tried dozens of workarounds for this but in the end the most reliable solution to avoid a browser crash was to just set a hard limit.

If  hiding these pins is a deal breaker, it is possible to override this in the Settings tab. Ensure this setting is toggled “off”

4. The map may behave differently for you vs. first-time visitors to your site

If you have already visited your store locator and allowed the app to “use your location”, the app will immediately execute a search based on your GPS coordinates. First time visitors will still see the map pin overview. This article shows how that works in more detail.

If you have any questions or something is not working as expected, please reach out at help@storemapper.co