Very often, when we need to visit a client or meet a business associate in their office, we would enter their address in our mobile phone’s Map application to get directions if we are not familiar with that place. Hence, if you have a business website, it will be providing a lot of convenience to your visitors if you were to embed the Google map on your web page.

In fact, if you configure with the right API, your visitors need not go to their Map application to enter your postal code. From your website, they can get directions easily.

Embedding Google Map into the website

These days, many SME companies build their own website without engaging a developer. If you are one of such companies, you can easily embed the Google map by getting an API key from the Google Cloud platform.  To make things easy, if your website is built with WordPress, install a plugin that allow you to embed the Google map.

The following are important steps to successfully to get the map on your website:

  1. Sign-in to Google Cloud platform 
  2. Enter your billing details (this is very important, without which it will not work)
  3. Create a project
  4. Select Credentials>Create Credentials ( Your APIs will be generated. You can select restrict API to only from your website)
  5. Go to Library, search for Map applications and enable at least the Maps JavaScript API and Geocoding API
  6. Go back to your website’s plugin settings to enter the API key.

Google provides a wide range of Map capabilities at different pricing:

Each of these API has different pricing base on the number of requests.

 

If you are using wix, then the steps are a lot simpler, as explained in this article.