On July 16th 2018 Google are applying new terms and pricing to their maps API. Is your site ready for the changes?
If you run an estate agency website, it’s highly likely that somewhere you utilise a Google map, be it showing a property’s location, allowing users to draw-a-search, or showing where your office is.
If this is the case you should be aware of upcoming changes on July 16th 2018 where a new pay-as-you-go pricing plan comes into effect. Each month you will get $200 worth of free credits, which equates to approximately 28,500 simple map loads per month. Unless you get thousands of page views each day you should fall within the free tier.
So I Don’t Need To Do Anything? Wrong…
By this deadline there are two things that need undertaking:
1: Set up a Google Cloud Platform Console account with your billing information.
2: Ensure that you are using a valid API key.
Note that if you do not perform the above actions, when you do try and display a map, an error may be shown to your users instead.
How Does This Effect Property Hive Users?
If you use Property Hive on your WordPress estate agency website this will apply to you if:
– You use the [property_map] or [property_street_view] shortcode to display a property’s location on a map.
– You use the Map View and Draw-a-Search add on.
– You import properties using the Property Import add on from a third party who don’t supply co-ordindates as part of data provided, such as the BLM format. In this scenario we use the the Google Geocoding API to obtain the co-ordinates from the address provided.
In these scenarios, once you have setup your Google Console correctly and generated an API key, you can simply enter it under ‘Property Hive > Settings > Map’. This API key will then get appended to all requests made by Property Hive.
If you have a license key and need assistance with this update please get in touch and we can assist.
More Information
Below you can find more information about these updates:
https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/important-updates
And below is a useful tool to calculate how many credits you might use and help work out if you might go over the $200 free credit limit.
