Displaying a map with clickable pins or regions is a common requirement on websites. These are some of my favorite plugins for doing that!
Clean Outline Maps (No Roads Shown)
These plugins are great for showing clean maps showing outlines of regions. They don’t show details like roads.
Interactive Geo Maps ★ (free and paid versions)
This is a fantastic map plugin that provides nice, clean-looking maps. Not super detailed with roads, etc., like Google Maps, but rather more for stylized high-level maps with regional outlines or pins. Easy to use with lots of options. For even more options, there is the paid version, which is worth every penny.
HTML5 Maps (free and paid versions)
This is another good choice for showing maps with clickable states or countries. If you need a simple clickable map of the United States or other countries without showing roads, this plugin is awesome.
There are a variety of countries to choose from or even individual states. If you pick the U.S. map, each state is clickable. You can define what happens on hover and click, and you can have tooltips, popups (with a free third-party plugin), link, or information appearing below or to the side of the map. You can also define clickable points. If you need to define groups of states, get the premium version.
Road Maps
These plugins are great for showing detailed maps with roads.
Leaflet Map ★
Most of the time when I want to display a road map with multiple pins, I use Leaflet Map, which uses an open-source map service. Maps and pins are really easy to create using shortcodes. This plugin is great because you don’t need to go through the pain of registering with Google.
You can see examples at LADateIdeas.com, SwingDance.LA, and MinardosGroup.build. On these sites, I added a custom field with map coordinates (which you can copy and paste from Google Maps) and wrote a simple plugin to display the pins on the map.
Elfsight Google Maps (paid)
This is not a WordPress plugin, but it is code that you can use in WordPress to generate an interactive road map with multiple place markers and filtering features. Has a monthly fee, but could be very useful if you need more advanced features like filtering.
WP Go Maps (free and paid versions)
WP Go Maps (formerly WP Google Maps) is great when you want to include a Google Map or open-source map on your site showing pins or regions. The pro version allows users to get directions and has other features. This is a very popular maps plugin, with over 400,000 downloads.
WP Maps Pro (paid)
This is a paid plugin for displaying interactive road maps with filterable locations. I have not tried it yet but it looks good.
Store Locator Plugin
WP Multi Store Locator
This plugin adds filtering to the map, like what you’d use for a store locator. You can filter by distance or category from a given starting point. It’s somewhat buggy; search by tags didn’t work for me, but I got everything else to work. Note that any search you do will include the “home” location on the map, which is a preset point, and not always what you may want.
The pro version shows search results sorted by distance and adds geolocation so that the map’s home location starts out at the user’s current location (if the user allows the browser access to location). Not a perfect plugin, but might get the job done for you.
An Awesome “Floorplan” Plugin with Clickable Regions
Draw Attention
This is an awesome plugin ideal for creating floorplans and photos with interactive clickable hover areas and popups. You literally draw the hover areas which can trigger content in a sidebar. Think shopping mall floor plan. Could be used for a custom map as well. A really fantastic plugin!
Please leave your questions or comments below! – Brian
I am a freelance web developer and consultant based in Santa Monica, CA. I’ve been designing websites using WordPress and from scratch using HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript since 2010. I create websites and web applications for businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from California Institute of Technology and a degree in Engineering Management (MSEM) from Stanford University.
Please Leave a Question or Comment