GCP – 15 Google Maps Platform Best Practices

Looking forward to 15 more years of collaboration, we’ve compiled 15 Google Maps Platform best practices to help you build your projects and businesses. 

1. Secure your API keys 

Restricting your API keys helps ensure your usage of Google Maps Platform is secure. We recommend you apply restrictions to every key you generate when you generate it. To learn how to restrict an API key, follow the walkthrough in our docs or watch this video. 

2. Set up budget alerts and quotas

To avoid surprises on your next bill, you can create a budget. Creating a budget will not disrupt your API usage and will only alert you when your spend amount exceeds your set limit. You can also set budget alert rules to trigger notifications to stay informed on how your spend is tracking against your budget. For more information on managing your budget, visit this guide.

Another solution to ensure you don’t exceed your budget is to set a quota. Quotas limit the number of requests your project can make per API and can be limited by day, second, and user per second. You can learn more about quotas from this guide or by watching this video. 

3. Get started with our comprehensive documentation 

Our documentation is a great place to start and the Frequently Asked Questions section includes in-depth answers to the questions we hear most. We offer in-depth guide and reference documentation for every features across every Google Maps Platform API and SDK.

4. Tap into community-driven help 

You can tap into community-driven support like the active Google Maps Platform developers community on StackOverflow. It’s a great place to ask technical questions about developing, debugging, and maintaining your apps. 

5. Get expert support when you need it

You can also take advantage of expert Google Maps Platform customer support. To create a case, all you have to do is visit the Google Maps Platform Support page in the Google Cloud Platform Console and select the project related to your question in the top dropdown bar. You can expect a 1 hour response time for Severity 1 issues during weekdays and 24 hours for lower severity issues.

6. Report issues to help yourself and other developers 

Our Issue Tracker is where we actively maintain a list of known and reported issues. This is where you can easily view already-reported bugs and feature requests, and add your own comments to help our teams investigate issues. Get started by filing a request in our Issue Tracker—including sample code or a screen capture will help us identify the issue and respond faster.

7. Share your feature ideas to help improve Google Maps Platform 

As you’re working with Google Maps Platform and think up a feature that would make things easier or better, you can add those ideas to the Issue Tracker as well.

8. Add multiple team members to your project

Make sure you add multiple team members to your project and consider using Google Cloud Platform organizations, so that your project can retain the proper set of owners as changes occur in your organization.

9. Sign up for updates from Google Maps Platform

You can get updates about our APIs, changes to our terms of service, support portal scheduled maintenance windows, and more. Just subscribe to ouremail notification group to now get your updates all in one place. Also, in the event we experience a service disruption, a banner message will appear in the Maps Support section of the Google Cloud Console, with a link to the issue tracker for more information to give you real-time status on the issue.

10. Apply for Google Maps Platform credits

Eligible organizations may apply for Google Maps Platform credits to support their organizations’ efforts. If you’re a nonprofit, startup, crisis response, or news media organization, you may be able to take advantage of these programs. You can learn more about eligibility and how to apply in our Understanding Public Programs page.

11. Follow us on social for tutorials, news, and more

Subscribe to the Google Maps Platform YouTube channel for helpful tutorials, product demos, or users stories. And to stay up to date on the latest news, follow us on Twitter. 

12. Use Google Maps Platform’s open-source utility libraries

In addition to our SDKs and APIs, we also offer a variety of open source utility libraries for JavaScript, Android, iOS, Node.js, and more. These libraries make additional useful features available to you, such as marker clustering and heatmaps.

13. Check out our GitHub

The Google Maps Platform GitHub org is full of useful open source sample apps and libraries to help you get started and do more. We love pull requests, so please contribute if you love open source as much as we do!

14. Try out new features

We’re always releasing new features and improving our products to make it easier for you to build. Utilize the latest tools and features to make sure you’re always improving the experience for your users. You can learn more about recent new features here. 

15. Optimize your implementations 

For a full list of strategies–from improving performance to reducing costs–check out our optimization guide. 

Whether you’re building a real-world game, adding a store locator to your website, or powering a platform to deliver essential items, these best practices will help you get things done so you can focus on building great experiences for your users. 

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.