Interactive Hiking Maps for WordPress
Turn your list of summits, trails, and viewpoints into a beautiful, interactive map — no coding required.
PeakMaps is a WordPress plugin built for hiking blogs, outdoor clubs, tourism sites, and anyone who wants to showcase peaks, trails, and points of interest on a real, interactive map. Add a searchable database of locations, complete with GPX tracks, elevation profiles, and rich filtering — then drop it into any page or post with a simple block or shortcode.
Whether you’re documenting every summit in a region, building a curated trail guide, or giving your readers a way to explore your content geographically, PeakMaps handles the map, the data, and the display — so you can focus on the content.
What PeakMaps Does
At its core, PeakMaps gives you a self-contained location database built specifically for hiking and outdoor content. You import your data once (via CSV), or you enter them manually, and PeakMaps takes care of the rest: rendering it on interactive Leaflet maps, generating a sortable/filterable table, calculating elevation profiles from GPX tracks, and letting visitors search, filter, and download tracks — all without a single line of code.
Add it to your site in two ways:
- A map block/shortcode — an interactive map showing your peaks, with clustering, GPX tracks, and elevation profiles.
- A table block/shortcode — a searchable, sortable data table of your peaks, perfect for browsable directories and overview pages.
Both can be placed anywhere, as many times as you like, each with its own filters and settings.
Key Features
🗺️ Interactive Mapping
- Built on Leaflet, the industry-standard open-source mapping library — fast, lightweight, and mobile-friendly.
- Marker clustering automatically groups nearby peaks at lower zoom levels and separates them as you zoom in, keeping busy maps clean and readable.
- Multiple background map layers to choose from, with an easy switcher for visitors: Norwegian topographic and nautical maps (Kartverket), OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, Esri satellite and topographic imagery, and CARTO light/dark themes.
- Fullscreen mode for an immersive, distraction-free map view.
- Built-in distance/measuring tool so visitors can measure trail segments directly on the map.
- GPS «find my location» button for visitors browsing on mobile while out on the trail.
- Smooth touch and pinch-zoom handling on mobile devices.
🏔️ GPX Tracks & Elevation Profiles
- Attach a GPX track to any peak and PeakMaps will render it on the map automatically.
- Automatic elevation profile charts, drawn on HTML5 Canvas, with interactive hover tooltips showing elevation and distance at any point along the track.
- Ascent/descent totals, min/max elevation, and total distance calculated automatically.
- Secure, built-in GPX proxy — tracks hosted on any domain load smoothly in the browser without CORS issues, and downloads work reliably on all devices, including iOS Safari.
- Optional high-resolution GPX variant support for more detailed single-track maps.
- Optional terms/consent dialog before visitors download a GPX file (e.g. «for personal use only»).
📊 Smart, Filterable Data Table
- A fully sortable, searchable table of your peaks — sort by name, elevation, municipality, county, visited date, and more.
- Live filtering by municipality, county, elevation range, free-text search, and visited status — no page reload required.
- Pagination with a configurable number of results per page.
- Optional row-number column for numbered lists.
- Choose exactly which columns to display, per map or table instance.
🗄️ Your Own Peak Database
- A dedicated, purpose-built database — not repurposed WordPress posts — for fast, clean querying at any scale.
- CSV import with both insert mode (add new entries) and update mode (fill in missing fields or overwrite existing ones on matching entries) — perfect for bulk-loading a whole region’s worth of peaks in seconds, or keeping data fresh as you update your source spreadsheet.
- Five customizable extra fields (labels fully configurable) for anything you want to track beyond the basics — difficulty rating, trailhead parking notes, permit requirements, whatever your project needs.
- Visited/completed tracking with flexible date formats, so it doubles as a personal or club peak-bagging log.
- Show/hide individual peaks without deleting their data — great for unpublished drafts or seasonal closures.
- Full admin interface: search, filter, sort, bulk-edit, bulk-delete, and duplicate entries directly from the WordPress dashboard.
🎨 Customization
- Choose from standard, circular, square, triangular, diamond, or star markers, in your track’s color or a fixed color.
- A palette of colored pin markers (red, green, orange, blue, purple, black) for quick visual categorization.
- Full control over track color, line width, and elevation-chart color to match your site’s branding.
- Adjustable map width, height, zoom level, and cluster behavior.
- Metric or imperial scale units (or both, or hidden entirely).
🌍 Built for Real-World Use
- Works via Gutenberg blocks (with a live, dynamic editor preview) or classic shortcodes (
[peakmaps_map],[peakmaps_table]) — drop it into any post, page, or template. - Multilingual out of the box: English source strings with a complete Norwegian Bokmål translation included, and standard WordPress i18n support for adding more languages.
- Automatic page-cache clearing on settings changes, with support for major caching plugins (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP-Optimize).
- Lightweight and fast: assets only load on pages that actually contain a map or table.
Free vs. Licensed
PeakMaps is fully functional without a license — no trial period, no expiring features, no nagging popups. A license simply unlocks a higher ceiling for larger or more customized projects.
| Feature | Free | Licensed |
|---|---|---|
| Interactive map, GPX tracks & elevation profiles | ✅ | ✅ |
| Sortable, filterable peak table | ✅ | ✅ |
| CSV import (insert & update modes) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Gutenberg blocks & shortcodes | ✅ | ✅ |
| International background maps (OpenStreetMap, OpenTopoMap, Esri, CARTO) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Standard & colored marker styles | ✅ | ✅ |
| Number of peaks in database | Up to 40 | Unlimited |
| Norwegian topographic & nautical maps (Kartverket) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Custom uploaded marker image | ❌ | ✅ |
| Extra custom fields | 1 field | 5 fields |
| «Presented by PeakMaps» credit link | Always shown | Optional |
Existing data and functionality are never disabled by an expiring or missing license — you simply can’t add new peaks past the free limit, or use the specific locked features above, until a license is added.
Perfect For
- Hiking and outdoor blogs documenting summits, trails, and viewpoints
- Tourism boards and destination sites showcasing regional attractions
- Hiking clubs and associations maintaining a shared, browsable peak list
- Guidebook and trail-guide publishers presenting curated routes
- Personal peak-bagging logs for trackers working through a summit list
PeakMaps is built on the open-source Leaflet mapping library and works with any modern WordPress theme.