We use Google Maps to create our routes on World Walking. Because most of our routes are very large, we only store "major" points from Google's directions service, that is when a route changes direction, etc. You might sometimes see the map draw a straight line between two points. If we showed every point from A to B, the website would be unresponsive for large routes as there would be too many points to draw on the map.
Your steps total should be increasing correctly each time you add distances and the % of the walk you have covered will be increasing too. You can check that by looking progress circle alongside the map on your walks page.
Once you have added enough steps to reach the next major point the green line will appear on the map and it will catch up with where you have reached on your walk. Please hang in there!
To try and make it clearer to users how far they have to walk to the next milestone we've added a progress bar below the milestone photograph. The circles along the line represent the milestones along the route and their spacing indicates the relative distance between each milestone.