by Graham Dyer If your property has an Engrain SightMap®, sooner or later someone on the team asks the obvious question: how do we get this on our website? The interactive map is often the single best leasing tool a community has, and it deserves better than living only inside a link. The answer comes in two parts. One takes five minutes. The other turns the map into the centerpiece of a site that search engines and AI assistants can read.
The standard embed: an iframe, five minutes
Every SightMap subscription comes with an embeddable version of your map. Engrain provides an embed URL for your property, and you place it on a page inside an iframe, a window in your page that displays content served from Engrain’s domain. If you do not have your embed URL to hand, your Engrain contact can supply it.
On WordPress, that means adding a Custom HTML block to any page and pasting the iframe. The equivalent embed element does the same job on Webflow, Squarespace or a hand-built site. Give the frame a generous height and publish. The interactive map is live, and visitors can pan the property, click units and browse floor plans exactly as they would on the SightMap itself.
A few lines of CSS make the frame behave. Let it fill the width of its container, give it a generous height and step that height down as the screen narrows, so the map never dwarfs a phone viewport. Wrap your iframe in a container (here .sightmap-embed) and add this to your stylesheet. On WordPress, Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS works fine:
.sightmap-embed iframe {
width: 100%;
height: 700px;
border: 0;
}
/* shorter frame as the screen narrows */
@media (max-width: 1024px) {
.sightmap-embed iframe { height: 600px; }
}
@media (max-width: 640px) {
.sightmap-embed iframe { height: 480px; }
}Engrain also gives developers two ways to push a plain embed further, and both are worth knowing about. The JavaScript IFrame API lets you control and customize the map programmatically: activate a specific unit, tailor the interface, wire your own call-to-action buttons into it. And the Metrics API exposes a clean stream of the map’s events, with a working example for sending them straight into Google Analytics 4. Both are capable, and both are JavaScript that you, or a developer, wire up yourself. A paste-and-go embed uses neither.
For a lot of teams this is a perfectly good first step, and if all you need is the map on a page, you can stop reading here. But if you care about where prospects come from (search, and increasingly AI assistants), it is worth understanding what that iframe is and is not doing for you.
What stays inside the frame
The typical embed asks very little of the map. You paste the iframe, let it carry all the live pricing, availability and apply-now links, then build nothing dynamic on your own page around it. Everything outside the frame just sits there.
Everything inside the frame (unit numbers, prices, availability, floor plans) belongs to the frame’s domain, not to your page. Google crawls your floor-plans page and finds almost no content of its own there. When a renter asks ChatGPT or Claude for ‘two-bedrooms under $2,400 near downtown’, the model cannot lift a single fact about your inventory from that page, because as far as it can read, the facts are not there. Our AI-visibility playbook goes into this at length, because an answer engine can only recommend what it can read.
Whatever the prospect does next also belongs to the frame. A renter who finds the unit they love can apply right away, because Engrain deep-links into your leasing system for that exact unit, and that handoff works cleanly. Everything around it never touches your own pages: no tour booking wired to your calendar, no lead capture, no favorites, no branded next step that keeps the prospect and their data in your pipeline. The journey is just not yours to brand, capture or measure.
The map also ends up standing alone. A SightMap is a superb way to see a building in space, but a bare embed makes it the only way in. A visitor who would rather browse layouts gets no floor-plans-first view, no unit cards or page-level filters beside the map and no shortlist to return to. The property’s story—the photography, the neighborhood, the reasons someone chooses this address over the one down the street—goes somewhere else entirely.
In practice these limits converge into one recognizable shape: a beautiful map on one tab, a grid of static, dead floor-plan cards on the other and no live data flowing between them, down to filters that do not agree. It is common enough that we gave it its own piece, the two-tab problem, with the failure modes, a two-minute test to check your own site and the images to prove it.
The native alternative
A complete integration keeps SightMap exactly where it belongs, as the interactive centerpiece, and makes everything around it just as alive. Floor-plan and unit cards become server-rendered HTML carrying live availability and pricing drawn from the same SightMap data. The page’s filters drive the cards and the map at once. Underneath, structured data lets search engines and AI assistants read every unit, and tour scheduling wires into your own lead capture. When a unit leases or a price moves, the page and its structured data follow in real time.
Historically, building that meant a custom development project, the kind agencies quote five figures for and then bill a monthly retainer to maintain. We built WP FloorMap to remove that cost.
Iframe or a built site
- The standard iframe if you just need the map on a page today, your traffic comes mostly from paid listings or direct links, and your own site’s SEO is not a priority yet. Free with your subscription, live in minutes.
- A complete site if you want the finished thing without the build. On every plan, we generate a beautiful, owned property website from your SightMap and PMS data and set it up for you in an afternoon, for less than a typical agency’s monthly retainer. Hosting, security and SEO are handled for you. The site, the content and the domain stay yours, editable in the WordPress editor.
Both keep SightMap at the center. The difference is how much of the page around it is alive, and how much of the work you would rather not do yourself. The one path worth avoiding is a lone iframe you assume is doing SEO work for you, which it is not.
Already have a WordPress site you’d like to keep? We can integrate WP FloorMap into it. Talk to us.
Frequently asked questions
Is the SightMap embed free?
The standard embed is included with your Engrain SightMap subscription, so putting the iframe on a page costs nothing beyond what you already pay Engrain. Everything around it varies: whether the units also exist on your page as readable text, whether its interactions land in your own analytics next to the rest of the visitor journey and whether the map connects to tour scheduling and lead capture. That surrounding layer is where the approaches differ.
Does an embedded SightMap help my SEO?
The map itself, no. Content inside an iframe belongs to the frame’s domain, not to your page, so search engines and AI assistants do not credit your site with the units, prices and availability inside it. Pair the map with the same units rendered as HTML and structured data on your own page.
Can I embed SightMap without WordPress?
Yes. The standard iframe works on any page that accepts custom HTML: Webflow, Squarespace, a hand-built site or a proprietary platform that allows embeds. WordPress only becomes relevant when you want the deeper, native integration, because that is where tools like WP FloorMap can render your live unit data as part of the page itself.
Do I need a developer to embed SightMap?
Not for the basic embed: pasting an iframe into a page is a copy-and-paste job. The native approach historically required custom development, which is exactly what WP FloorMap replaces. It generates the complete site around your SightMap, and on every plan Foreword sets the whole thing up for you, so neither path requires hiring a developer anymore.
The demo sites run the native integration end to end. View the source of one and the units are there as text, priced and dated, which is the whole difference from an iframe. Send us a SightMap link and we will do the same with your inventory.
