How to use Google Maps with more than 10 stops

The limit, explained

Google Maps is great at getting you from A to B. It was not built to plan a delivery day. Two limits get in the way:

• 10 locations per route. On desktop you can enter a start plus 9 more stops. Shared links that open on a phone often support fewer waypoints, so a route that looks fine on your laptop can get cut short on your phone.
• No reordering. Google Maps drives your stops in the exact order you typed them. If stop 7 is next door to stop 2, it will still send you there seventh.

For a few errands that is fine. For a delivery route, the second limit costs more than the first. Typing 10 stops in a poor order can add 20 to 40 minutes to a short route.

Option 1: Split the route into legs

The manual workaround is to break your day into chunks of 10 and build each one in Google Maps.

1. Sort your addresses by area.
2. Build a route with the first 10.
3. When you finish, make the last stop the start of the next route and add the next 9.

This works, but it has real costs. You do the ordering yourself, so the route is only as good as your guess. You retype addresses for every leg. And if a customer reschedules mid-day, you rebuild the leg by hand.

Option 2: Optimize first, then navigate with Google Maps

The better approach is to split the two jobs. Let a route planner decide the order, and let Google Maps do what it is good at: turn-by-turn directions with live traffic.

In the SoloRoute app:

• Add your stops by pasting a list, importing a spreadsheet, scanning a printed manifest or searching addresses.
• Tap Optimize. You get the fastest order and arrival times for every stop.
• Tap Navigate on the next stop. It opens in Google Maps with that one destination.
• Mark the stop delivered and tap Navigate again for the next one.

Because each stop opens on its own, the 10-stop limit never comes up. You can run 20 stops for free, or up to 100 per route on Pro for $7.99 a month. If you prefer Waze or Apple Maps, pick that instead in settings.

Tips for driving a multi-part route

• Check the first and last stop of each part. They should connect. The next part starts where the last one ended.
• Keep your phone charged. Opening many navigation sessions uses battery. A car charger is worth it.
• Do not reorder in Google Maps. If you drag stops around inside Google Maps, you undo the optimized order. Make changes in the planner instead.
• Use full addresses. Google Maps may pick a different place for a short or vague address than the planner did. City and zip code prevent that.

When Google Maps alone is enough

If you run 5 or 6 stops a few times a week and they are spread in an obvious line, Google Maps on its own is fine. Once you pass 10 stops, or the stops are scattered, the time spent ordering by hand is more than the time it takes to paste a list into a planner.

See how SoloRoute and Google Maps compare feature by feature on our SoloRoute vs Google Maps page.