Coverage maps

One field decides pin or coverage

There is no separate system for premises and service areas. It reads the coordinates on each area, which you set in the Area details box:

• Coordinates only: the area gets a pin. Somewhere customers come to you.
• Coordinates plus a coverage radius: it also gets a shaded circle showing how far you cover, with a small dot at the centre instead of a pin. Somewhere you travel to.

So a business with two clinics and a mobile service across six counties plots both on the same map, and they read differently from each other. The radius field sits on each area, in miles or kilometres depending on the unit you choose in Pro settings. An area without coordinates is skipped rather than plotted at latitude zero.

The shading is a radius, not a traced administrative boundary. For a mobile service that is usually the more honest shape, and it needs no boundary data to go stale.

Where the map goes

• [townsmith_map] in your blueprint maps each generated page’s own area, so one blueprint serves every page.
• [townsmith_map scope="all"] on a hub page maps every area you cover, premises and coverage together.
• [townsmith_map area="123"] maps one specific area wherever you want it.

Add height="480" to change the height in pixels. Scroll-wheel zoom is deliberately off, so the map never hijacks the page as a reader scrolls past it.

Turning it on

Under Local Pages, Pro settings, tick Coverage maps. Until you do, the shortcode outputs nothing and no map tile is ever requested.

What loads from outside, and what does not

This is the one Pro feature that fetches something from a third party, so it is worth being precise about. When maps are on, each visitor’s browser requests map tiles from OpenStreetMap. That means a visitor’s IP address reaches openstreetmap.org, the same as any other request their browser makes.

Nothing about your site, your content, your pages or your customers is sent anywhere. Your area coordinates are printed into your own page and never transmitted. There is no API key and no account. The mapping library is bundled inside the plugin rather than pulled from a CDN, so tiles are the only outside request, and the free plugin still makes none at all.

Because a visitor’s IP reaches a third party, mention it in your privacy policy, and consider a consent gate depending on where your visitors are. If you would rather not use OpenStreetMap, the tile source is filterable through townsmith_lpe_map_config, so you can point it at tiles you host or pay for. The snippet is in the Pro add-on’s PRIVACY.md.