TurnKey Directories

Description

TurnKey Directories turns a WordPress install into a structured business directory. The free plugin lets you create unlimited listings manually — one at a time through a simple “Add a Listing” form — and ships with a setup wizard, a public-facing search and listing UI, dynamic virtual directory pages, LocalBusiness and directory-level schema, and XML + HTML sitemaps. Need to populate a directory in bulk? Bulk CSV/XLSX import and business-data import via the Outscraper API are available in the optional Pro add-on.

Core Features

• Setup wizard that walks through the optional integrations (Google Search Console/GA4, Mapillary), adding your first listings, and sitemap generation.
• Manual listing creation — add unlimited listings one at a time through an “Add a Listing” form, with a full editor for photos, working hours, and contact details.
• Dynamic virtual directory pages across niche, country, state, city, and business levels, generated on the fly from your listings.
• Faceted search + Leaflet map with filtering, search, and pagination.
• Schema.org JSON-LD: LocalBusiness and BreadcrumbList on every listing page, directory-level CollectionPage / ItemList schema on category (niche/country/state/city) pages, plus WebSite + SearchAction site-wide.
• XML and HTML sitemaps so newly added listings are discoverable.
• Accent-color and typography customization (Settings → Appearance) to match your brand.
• Two shortcodes — [turnkeydir_dynamic_directory] renders the category overview anywhere; [turnkeydir_city_directory category="" state="" city=""] embeds a city listing block.
• Mapillary integration to pull street-view imagery for listings with coordinates.
• Google Search Console + Analytics (GA4) connection with per-page analytics.
• Optional “Powered by” credit — opt-in (off by default).
• Performance-first architecture: object-cache-aware caching layer, prepared statements throughout, encrypted secrets at rest, rate-limited customer-facing AJAX endpoints.

Upgrade to Pro

TurnKey Directories Pro adds bulk CSV/XLSX import, business-data import via the Outscraper API, business-owner claims and a customer portal, on-site reviews, multi-engine indexing (Google Indexing API + IndexNow), keyword-rank tracking, Stripe subscription billing, display ad zones, and the cross-site directory link network (Network Hub). The free plugin runs fully on its own; Pro is an optional add-on.

External services

This plugin can talk to a number of third-party services. No service is contacted on its own: the Mapillary and Google integrations are opt-in via the setup wizard or the relevant settings tab, and the admin-side Nominatim geocoding runs only when you save an address in the listing editor. On the visitor side, directory pages load OpenStreetMap map tiles (the maps are a core feature of the directory pages), and a listing page embeds a video or street-view frame only when that listing has one.

• OpenStreetMap tile server (tile.openstreetmap.org) — whenever a directory page renders its Leaflet map (and likewise for the map preview in the wp-admin listing editor), the browser requests the map-tile images for the viewed area directly from OpenStreetMap. As with any image request, the viewer’s IP address and user agent reach the tile server, along with the tile coordinates of the map area being viewed. Operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Tile usage policy · Privacy policy.
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim (nominatim.openstreetmap.org) — geocoding lookups (forward and reverse). Used in two places: (1) the admin listing editor sends the address text or coordinates you enter; (2) on the public directory search, when a visitor chooses to use their current location, their browser sends those coordinates to resolve them to a place name (user-initiated; the browser also asks for geolocation permission first). Usage policy · Privacy policy.
• Mapillary / Meta (graph.mapillary.com) — opt-in; when a Mapillary client token is configured, the plugin sends each listing’s latitude/longitude (plus your token) to request street-view imagery for that listing. The returned images are then loaded by visitors’ browsers from Mapillary’s image CDN (tiles.mapillary.com, scontent.xx.fbcdn.net), and where a listing shows an interactive street-view embed the visitor’s browser loads Mapillary’s embed viewer from www.mapillary.com (the visitor’s IP address and user agent reach Meta’s servers). Terms of use · Privacy policy.
• Google — opt-in: when you connect Google integration, the admin requests Google Search Console and Analytics (GA4) reporting on your behalf, sending your OAuth tokens and your site URL (accounts.google.com, oauth2.googleapis.com, googleapis.com). This connection is used only to read your own reporting data into the admin Analytics dashboard; the plugin does not add any Google tracking tag to your public pages. Terms of service · Privacy policy.
• YouTube / Vimeo video embeds — when a listing has a video URL on record, its listing page embeds that video player in the visitor’s browser (youtube.com / player.vimeo.com); the embed provider receives the visitor’s IP address and user agent, as with any embedded player. No video services are contacted on pages without a listing video. YouTube terms · Google privacy · Vimeo terms · Vimeo privacy.
• Directions links — the “Get Directions” buttons are plain user-initiated links that open the visitor’s maps application (Google Maps or the platform’s geo: handler); nothing is contacted until the visitor taps them.
• Share links — the share buttons on directory pages are likewise plain user-initiated links to the visitor’s chosen network (Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, or an email draft); nothing is contacted until the visitor taps one, at which point the shared page URL and title travel to that network as part of the link.

Bundled third-party libraries

All front-end libraries are bundled locally — the plugin loads none of its own assets from any CDN. (The only external scripts are the per-listing video/street-view embeds — see the external-services list above.) Bundled (with links to their readable source): Leaflet 1.9.4 (BSD-2), Chart.js 4.5.1 (MIT), Font Awesome Free 6.7.2 (icons CC BY 4.0, code MIT, fonts OFL), jsVectorMap 1.7.0 (MIT), and the Inter typeface (OFL). Each library’s full license text ships alongside it under public/vendor/.

Source Code & Bug Reports

Source code, issue tracker, and contribution guidelines are available at turnkeydirectories.com.

Recommended hosting setup

The plugin schedules daily background tasks for Google Analytics / Search Console sync and Mapillary image fetching. By default WordPress’s wp_cron piggybacks on regular page loads — meaning a logged-in admin viewing a public page can be the one that synchronously runs an overdue background task. If a Google API call is slow that day, that page load is slow too.

For best front-end performance, offload wp_cron to a real server cron:

1. In wp-config.php, above the “stop editing” comment, add:

   define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);

2. In your hosting control panel’s cron-job manager (Hostinger hPanel → Advanced → Cron Jobs, or cPanel → Cron Jobs), add an every-five-minute job that hits wp-cron.php:

   */5 * * * * curl -s https://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

   (replace YOUR-DOMAIN.com with your actual site)

After this, all background tasks run in their own short-lived process and never block a visitor’s page render.

As a defense-in-depth, each scheduled callback also has a DOING_CRON guard and an in-flight transient lock so even with default wp_cron enabled, a slow Google API call can’t be re-entered by a concurrent page load and is bounded by a short HTTP timeout. With both the server-cron offload and the in-plugin guards in place, the impact of any third-party API outage on your front-end response time is effectively zero.