Developing a website or web application is an expensive and time-intensive undertaking. As technology changes, however, those time frames are getting shorter. Not so long ago, it wasn’t unusual for your clients’ new feature requirements to take months to develop. It was a situation that put heavy pressure on your developers. In this article, we’ll share the list of the top 10 best APIs for website developers.
But times are changing. With the introduction of APIs, your development teams have gained some flexibility. Now, they can enhance or develop features for your site or application faster than ever before. To put it simply, APIs save you development time. They let you produce quality products more quickly. But, best of all, they help you keep your budget low. That puts you in a position to invest in even more advancements to your product or software.
Are you interested in finding out more about how APIs can help you keep your overheads down while increasing your flexibility and productivity?
If the answer is yes, read on to discover the 10 best APIs to help you to speed up your development process significantly. Let’s take a look at them now.
Mailboxlayer APIs for Website Developers
Mailboxlayer is a simple JSON API that validates email deliverability and quality. It does more than just a simple client-side email validation, however. Mailboxlayer lets you verify email addresses as they come into your system. It is proactive, validating emails before you add them to your database or mailing list. This ensures that when you do send an email, that it is going to a real customer. That’s right, Mailboxlayer helps you collect quality data. It reduces fake email registrations and, in doing so, significantly increases marketing effectiveness.
Mailboxlayer is also feature-rich. You can check your signups for role-based emails and known disposable emails, all with a simple REST call. You can also check for typos to further identify and easily eliminate fake IDs. In addition to that, Mailboxlayer has interactive documentation. By simply following instructions, you can rapidly integrate the mailboxlayer API. Overall, it’s one of the best email validation and verification JSON API for developers.
Positionstack
Many applications use GeoLocation to offer their users location-specific functionality. However, talking about GeoLocation is one thing, actually adding accurate GeoLocation to your application is another set of APIs for website developers.
That’s where Positionstack saves the day. With Positionstack you can embed maps into your application that shows you exactly where your users are. It is an easy-to-use REST API that gives you highly accurate forward and reverse batch Geocoding. In short, with Positionstack, your app can instantly translate street addresses to GPS coordinates or convert GPS coordinates to street addresses.
Creating embeddable maps is a breeze with Positionstack’s map_url field. It returns an embeddable map associated with the location result. Here is an example:
| { “data”: [ { “results”: [ { ……………. ……………. …………… “map_url”: “https://ift.tt/3lXYwHO;, } ] } |
Positionstack has easy-to-follow documentation. It also gives you options. It provides code samples in a variety of languages that include PHP, Python, Node, JQuery, Go, and Ruby. What does this mean to you as a developer? It’s simple, it means you can quickly and easily add Positionstack to any application with just a few lines of code.
Screenshotlayer
Have you ever bricked your website? If you have, you know that you never want it to happen again. The good news is you can easily prevent it by checking whether or not it renders after you deploy. More importantly, if you want to avoid tedious manual checks, you can capture high-quality snapshots of your site automatically with Screenshotlayer. After that, you can review the images to verify that any change in code doesn’t disrupt the existing features or structure of your website. Think of it as automatic visual regression testing.
Screenshotlayer boasts a powerful rendering engine. In just a few seconds, it can process, store and return all sorts of website content, including Webfonts, CSS3, and Graphs. Each screenshot is also assigned to a separate server entity. What this means to you is an unparalleled level of screenshot quality and speed for every API request. Finally, Screenshotlayer is highly customizable. It gives you plenty of options to inject your own CSS and modify your target website.
Weatherstack APIs for Website Developers
A weather app is only as good as its information source. If you are working on a weather app, you need to provide up-to-date, location-specific information. Of course, your data also needs to be highly accurate. With Weatherstack, you can retrieve real-time weather information instantly in lightweight JSON format.
Weatherstack offers hour-by-hour weather information for millions of cities and towns around the world. It also gives you access to highly accurate historical data. In addition, it is powered by a best-in-class cloud infrastructure. What that means on your end is as close to 100% uptime as you can possibly get. Weatherstack is trusted by over 75,000 companies worldwide.
Scrapestack
Many websites don’t have an API you can use to collect important information. This means you often have to visit them one by one to find the data that you are looking for. If that is something you would rather avoid, then Scrapestack lets you scrape sites in milliseconds to quickly and collect the data you need.
In addition to speed, Scrapestack has several cool features that would be difficult to build on your own. For example, it supports proxying, which prevents your IP address from being blocked. It utilizes a pool of 35+ million IP addresses worldwide. By proxying your location, it makes you look as if you’re from a different country. It also supports JavaScript rendering, so you can scrape sites built with frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.
Userstack
Do you want to know what kind of browsers and devices your application needs to support? Look no further than Userstack. This REST API parses User-Agent strings to accurately detect your user’s browsers and devices. One practical application of this is making sure the wrong screen sizes doesn’t cost you conversions
UserStack also helps your team track regressions on various operating systems, browsers, and to make sure your app’s user experience is perfect. It is also very easy to use. You can get started in seconds using this simple JSON REST API interface.
Vatlayer APIs for Website Developers
Let’s face it, taxes are complicated and the cost to your business of making mistakes could be huge. Thankfully you can offload some of that responsibility to Vatlayer. It is another simple REST-based JSON API that offers instant EU VAT number validation, VAT compliant price calculations, and VAT rates.
Based on your user’s location, Vatlayer provides up-to-date VAT information directly from the European Commission databases. It is also very easy to use and integrate. You just need to make a request using a simple URL structure. Vatlayer deals with the rest.
Check out Vatlayer to avoid VAT troubles altogether.
Bitly APIs for Website Developers
Bitly is one of the most popular link management platforms on the planet. It provides a simple but necessary service. It shortens your URLs. With shorter URLs, you can share them on social media without ramping up your character count or distracting your readers from your copy text. If you don’t want to do it manually, you can use the Bitly API in your application.
The Bitly API has several amazing functions. These include automated link customization and also mobile deep linking. It also supports click analytics. As a result, you can analyze the people visiting your links. In addition, you can gain valuable insight by examining how people are sharing your links. Finally, the Bitly API is very easy to use and quickly add to your application.
NewsAPI.org
Do you want to monitor specific companies? Do you need help making decisions in your industry? Look no further than NewAPI.org. It gives you the latest breaking news with a simple REST call. That, and it’s incredibly easy to integrate with your web application.
NewsAPI returns JSON metadata for headlines published from over 80,000 sources worldwide. It’s perfect if your news app needs the most up-to-date industry-specific information.
The Open Food Repo
In the retail sector and selling gourmet food products? Do you need information about food for your application? You can easily get it with the Open Food Repo. It is a community-driven database for barcoded food products. The Open Food Repo API gives you full access to all the content in their database.
The Open Food Repo API has powerful search tools and high-quality images. You can also use it to implement several cool features, like the ability to search for foods by barcode to get nutrition information.
Why are APIs the dev’s best friends?
APIs help you supercharge your abilities and take the functionality of your application to a whole new level. You don’t have to spend a lot of time integrating new features into your apps. You just need to add a few lines of code. APIs help you save a lot of time and significantly enhance your productivity as a developer. That’s why they are your best friends.
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