Signal is often worst exactly where people need a map — a car park, a basement, a showground marquee, a printed QR scanned in a dead spot. So your published maps keep working offline. It's built in and automatic: there's no setting to switch on, and nothing you need to do to enable it.
How it works
When a visitor opens one of your maps while online, their browser quietly keeps a copy. If they later lose their connection, the map still opens and works from that copy. When they're back online they always get the live, fresh version — the cached copy is only ever a fallback, so an offline visitor never gets a stale map that a connected one wouldn't.
map.au subdomain). It's part of the published visitor experience — it isn't active on the editor or the Mapvera dashboard.What gets saved for offline use
Opening a map caches everything needed to use that whole map without a connection — not just the parts the visitor happened to scroll to.
| Saved offline | Detail |
|---|---|
| The whole map | Every location works offline, not only the one a visitor deep-linked to — the full map is there. |
| Images and logos | Location photos, category icons, pins and store logos — including logos hosted on other websites. |
| The map's code and styling | So the map looks and behaves the same offline as online. |
| Short links and QR targets | A scanned /m short link resolves offline too, so a printed QR works even where there's no signal — as long as someone has opened the map online before. |
What visitors will notice offline
The map itself is fully usable, but anything that has to reach the wider internet naturally can't load. Mapvera handles this gracefully so nothing looks broken.
| Feature | Offline behaviour |
|---|---|
| Search, directory, directions, floors, the blue dot | All work — they run inside the map. |
| Links to other websites | A stand-alone button (like a store's website) is hidden; a link inside a sentence is disabled but its words stay, so the text still reads. |
| The Edit button and Draft badge | Never shown to visitors offline — those are for signed-in owners and need a live connection. |
| A page that was never opened online | Shows a tidy "you're offline" screen that reloads itself the moment the connection returns. |
Keeping the offline copy fresh
You don't manage the cache and you never have to clear it — but it's worth knowing how updates reach people.
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Publish as normal
Every time you Save & Publish a change, the offline copy is invalidated automatically. There's nothing to bump or expire by hand.
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Visitors get the update next time they're online
The refreshed map is picked up on a visitor's next online visit — from then on their offline copy matches your latest published version.
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A map you unpublish won't linger
If you set a map back to Draft, a visitor who had it cached won't stay stuck on the old public page — the moment they reconnect, the map reloads and reflects that it's no longer public.
Good to plan for
Offline works best when a device has opened the map online at least once — that first visit is what fills the cache. For events in poor-signal venues, it helps to have staff or a welcome sign encourage people to open the map on arrival (or wherever signal is good) so it's ready when they wander into a dead spot. Printed QR codes benefit most: as long as anyone on that device has visited your maps online before, the scanned link still resolves without signal.