Adding Google Maps to WordPress – How to Integrate Google Maps with Your Site

A contact page should be a must-have for a website. Presenting your visitors detailed information about yourself and your business will make them trust you more and will ease their way to getting in touch with you.

Having all transparent and public will make your business more reliable and you will surely manage to get closer to your target audience.

Having a complex contact page won’t just increase your users’ confidence in you, but will also serve as an effective branding strategy.

How to add Google Maps in your WordPress site?

It’s not nearly as difficult as you think it is. Actually, it will take you just a few minutes. There are a couple of great free WordPress plugins that can do this job for you very quickly.

Next, I will show you all the steps on how to effectively add Google Maps to your site.

One of the best free WordPress plugins out here is Intergeo Maps. It is an awesome plugin that lets you create modern and fully-featured maps for your site and also lets you customize them the way you like.

Intergeo Maps plugin is the master of details, as it allows you to mark every small place on the map in various and catchy fashions.

Before starting to create the map, let’s take a look at a few of this plugin’s most important key points:

• Shortcodes. The plugin gives you a shortcode for each different map you create. After you created the map, you can use that shortcode and paste it wherever you want on your WordPress sites and your map will appear in that specific place.
• A powerful UI builder that comes with a very intuitive interface for any kind of users. It lets you choose your map’s positions and zooming level, the colors, adjust the controls, use geometric figures to mark spots, pick various routes, and add ad banners. And all of these in a very interactive and friendly way.
• A map library, so all the maps you’ll create will be safe if you want to use them again another time.

How to set up Intergeo Maps?

After you installed the plugin, go to the page or post where you want to insert the map. Click on Add Media and, in the left column, you’ll see Intergeo Maps.

Here’s how it would look at a first glance:

As you can see in the right bar, this plugin offers you lots of customization options. You can play with the options and customize the map the way you want. You can choose your map’s appearance, position, a detailed information about a certain place, the legend’s position and look, directions and dimensions, and some other great stuff.

Let’s take the sections one at a time:

In the first one, Positioning & Zooming, you can set a specific map position, view, and zoom. You can choose to see the map in four different ways: road, satellite, terrain, or hybrid.

To change the zooming level, go to Zooming section. If you want a closer or a further view to a specific point on the map, you can modify the numbers and follow the live preview. Here you can also choose if you want your map to be draggable or fixed, so your users can explore the places around your location or not.

In Controls, you can control the position for every single item that will show up on your map. For example, you can move the Pan, the MapType, the SteetView, and the Zoom.

In Styles, you can pick the dimensions, the border, and the color for the map.

Intergeo Maps comes with a couple of predefined map styles but, bonus!, the plugin lets you use your own styling if you have one. Use the Custom option for that and upload your version.

If you want to highlight specific places on the map – to make it easier for your visitors to spot them – you can draw various geometric figures (rectangles, circles, polygons, and markers) from the Overlays section. Pick a figure and start “drawing”.

To mark a path between two specific points on the map, you need to use the Directions section. The plugin provides four different paths, depending on the people that need it: bikers, car drivers, pedestrians, or just public transit.

Also, as a bonus point, Intergeo Maps plugin comes with AdSense integration, so if you want to place some ad banners here and there for a better monetization, you can do this with it.

Okay, so after you’ve finished with the entire customization, get ready to see the map you created right in the post/page you wanted it to appear in the first place. Click on the “Insert into post” button and a shortcode will show up in your text editor.

And that’s your map. If you want to change its position or location, just copy and paste that code to another page. Your map won’t be lost anyway.

Integeo Maps is a plugin for those who want to have their own custom maps and not use Google’s default ones. So if you feel like showcasing a customized map that looks to your liking, Intergeo Maps is a good choice, you can download it for free.

Was this tutorial useful? Tell us about your experiences with Google Maps.