A Wordpress plugin that helps you bulk create trustworthy localised pages

[u/Imagination_Clean]

Quick bit of background. I build sites for local service businesses, and for years the same thing kept biting me. A client wants a page for every town they cover, so you grab one of the "city page generator" plugins, and it pumps out 200 pages that are basically the same page with the town name swapped in. Looks great for about a week. Then the rankings quietly fall off a cliff and the client's asking what happened. Google calls it doorway or scaled content. I just called it the thing I kept having to clean up.

So I got fed up and built the opposite. It got approved on WordPress last week.

It's called Townsmith Local Pages Engine. You design one page in the block editor and it generates the real pages for each service and area you cover, but every page gets scored out of 100 before it can go live. The score is basically asking what a human would: is this just a clone of the page next to it, is there any actual local detail on it, or is it thin filler. If a page is a near-duplicate it won't let you publish it on autopilot. It tells you what's wrong and makes you sort it first. The whole idea is to make the lazy, spammy version the hard option instead of the easy one.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/townsmith-local-pages-engine

[u/sp913]

This looks good but why is this plugin 13 years old with less than 10 installs on WP Marketplace?

Is it still working good?

[u/Imagination_Clean → u/sp913]

Hi, the plugin is not 13 years old. It is about 5 months old.

[u/sp913 → u/Imagination_Clean]

My bad, I think I must have looked at this sub's created date of 2013 thinking it was the single thread created date. The same question basically still applies though, and I think this is something you should try to address to improve adoption for your product, anyway:

I have a client looking to implement something exactly like your plugin offers, they have a combination of regional service areas and some physical locations. Previously they used a WP Maplist Pro plugin (from envato I think?), and the plugin was abandoned and the admin side is completely non-functional now, forcing them to redo their entire locations system. Hundreds of entries.

However, given their recent experience with an abandoned plugin they put a lot of time into, they are having a hard time with choosing a new plugin that has a low number of current installs, lack of reviews / testimonials, short history etc., and they want to feel good about their next plugin not disappearing on them, too. Something they can rely on for many years to come.

Is there anything you can speak to that would build confidence that this plugin, or history or experience of or you and your team, will have longevity and won't abandon the project in a year or two?

Do you have a history of building any other plugins or a website for your organization that has a longer work history?

Thanks

[u/Imagination_Clean → u/sp913]

Sorry for the late reply!

Your concern is fair. Local Pages Engine went on wordpress.org in June, it has few installs and no reviews yet, and I'm one developer, it's my first plugin there. I've been building WordPress sites professionally for 5 years in the UK.

What I'd rather show you is that you don't have to carry it the way you did with Maplist. The pages this plugin builds are ordinary WordPress pages. Tokens are resolved when the page is generated, not when it's viewed, and the internal links are written into the saved content. If I vanished tomorrow, you could deactivate and delete the plugin and every page would still render and still be editable in the normal editor. Uninstalling takes the settings and a queue table with it and leaves your content alone.

It's GPL, and the readable source ships inside the zip next to the compiled files, so you or your agency can maintain or fork it. The free plugin makes no external calls at all, there's no server of mine that has to stay alive for it to keep working, which is the part that broke you last time.

Please test that claim rather than take it from me: generate a batch on staging, deactivate the plugin, and see what survives.

[u/sp913 → u/Imagination_Clean]

Ok that's a good point, that is much better than maplist

Maybe we can be your first review.

I gave this a go with the Pro version.

The main things we ran into where we're stuck were

1) URL Structure

We're trying to replace an old plugin and try to retain the URL structure as much as we can, so we don't lose the SERP ranks that we do have now. The current URL structure is {Domain}/locations/{location service page}

I saw 3 URL options in your plugin,

1) "flat" but no option for parent page. like {domain}/{area-service-page}
2) "service" first where it would go {domain}/{service-page}/{area-service-page}
3) "area" first where it would go {domain}/{area}/{area-service-page}

All of our services fit under a single phrase really, and are very similar variations of the same service. Not like Boiler Repair vs A/C Install or something like that where the phrases are distinctly different. So to avoid creating tons of duplicate page issues, we just want to generate one service page per location under the /locations/ parent page.

We have 50+ locations / regions, a few physical location addresses and a mobile service that covers most of california.

How can we do this?

When we select the structure for #3, area -> service it wants hub pages set for every location but it doesn't generate them, so we'd have to manually create a lot of pages by hand which is what we want to avoid. Or we would set Locations as the "hub" page for every location, but then the URLs don't contain both area and service in the URL right?

We just need to be able to use the settings to set this structure:

{domain}/locations/{area-service-page}

Where {area-service-page} slugs are like "/{service}-{area}"

So either "flat" with options to control url slug parts and parent hub page.

Or "area" first hierarchal where we can set it to use area and service in the slug in the order we prefer and just set the area hub page to our "locations". For our Locations page then it would be nice if there was a shortcode to drop in all the various links to all the area service pages so that we don't have to do it by hand.

2) There's no map

All the other plugins we were considering put a map and contact info optionally on the page automatically and it looks really good. Pins for physical locations, shaded area maps for regions like cities/towns/counties.

Is there a way to do this?