This page can’t load Google Maps correctly – Error message

James Miodonski 23rd of June 2018

This page can’t load Google Maps Correctly – For development purposes only. You’ve likely come across this message on your own website, one you manage or potentially a site you’re browsing. We explain what it means and what you need to do.

Why is Google Maps not showing on my website?

Embedding a Google Map into your website is about the easiest and slickest way to highlight your business’ location in a clean and interactive way.

Whilst the Google Maps service is used usually on your website for contact pages, it is also used for resolving postcodes into coordinates for use with distance calculations and map markers – think postcode lookups for generating online delivery quotes etc. It is quite important, therefore, that this continues to work with your website.

The good news is that Google are continuing to offer a free tier which most small to medium sized business websites are unlikely to exceed, but they do require you to set billing for your account to use this service regardless. It’s reasonably painless, and shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes to set up.

What do I need to do?

To set up billing on your account, please follow the following steps:

1. Log in to Google with your company account: https://accounts.google.com/. (If you don’t have a Google account, you can register one free here too)
2. Visit the Google Maps API page: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/
3. Click ‘Get Started’ > Tick ‘Maps’ > Click Continue.
4. Create a new project. You could call it ‘Company Website Map Account’ for example – it doesn’t actually matter what you call it. Click Next.
5. From here you can follow the simple steps to set up billing.
6. At the end of the process you will be provided with an API key which will look like a random string of text. Please copy this and send it back to us so that we can update your website with the new key.

However, as of June this year, Google announced that they were no longer supportingkeyless usage to Google Maps.  In effect, they now require all Google Maps related projects have a associated billing account (complete with valid debit/credit card details) put into place, along with a valid API key for this service to continue.

To skip to the solution – click here for Google’s own Get Started guide.

What happens if I ignore this?

Well, unless you’ve followed the steps above to get this set up, the chances are that the embedded Map section / Contact Us on your website now looks a bit like this:

Still stuck?

No probs, get in touch with Creatomatic Support and we’ll keep you right.