When you have a large number of locations it's important to configure your Store Locator for best performance to make it the best possible customer experience. This can be an issue with large numbers of locations because by design, our Store Locator will show all the locations that are located inside the visible map area. This avoids the confusing situation for a customer where the map is displaying an area but no locations are shown. In that scenario they might assume that there are no locations at all in that particular area.
For example, if your initial view is configured to show the whole of the USA and you have 10,000 locations in the USA, the locator will attempt to show all 10,000 locations on the map at once. This offers a poor customer experience for two reasons:
- The customer’s web browser will take some time to render all the locations making the store locator appear unresponsive.
- The map will appear cluttered with thousands of location markers on display at once.
To improve the performance and usability of the store locator, we recommend making the following configuration changes:
- Set the Starting Map View to a smaller physical area on the map. A good starting point could be a major city where most of your customers or locations are located or where your head office is physically hosted. Again, the aim here is not to try and show too many locations at once to avoid cluttering the map with too many markers.
- Marker Display - best set to 'Show Visible Markers Only' - this means that the locator doesn't try to display all the locations at the map when they are not visible. This improves load times and responsiveness.
- Customer Geolocation - set to 'Automatically locate user at page load' - this means the customer's location is identified and the closest store to them is immediately shown.Limit results returned - set to around 100 locations to limit how many locations are listed in the left hand column (again improves speed and browser performance).
- Search radius selector - set to Enabled and Default search radius set to say 50kms. Again, this improves speed and performance.