30+ Most Popular APIs for Web in 2020
There was a time when clients demanded features that left software development companies scratching their heads. It took months for companies to figure out how to develop something like that. Today, with the most popular APIs, the overall hindrance in developing applications has been reduced. With an API, you can connect your website with any application and fetch its features or data.
APIs allow you to increase features on your website and enhance the on-page customer experience. It would have taken much more time to streamline processes from the back-end if it were not for the API.
Collection of 31 Most Popular APIs
Tech giants like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, PayPal, etc., and individual developers have created APIs that web developers can use to streamline web development. API hound has a repository of 50,000+ APIs whereas, ProgrammableWeb has 22000+ APIs available for free. However, developers say that only 1% of them are worth using. If you’d rather create your own, the team at RapidAPI has shared the resource: How to Create Your Own API (20+ Tutorials by Programming Language).
Below are the Top 31 recommended APIs for web development and design.
#1 Google Analytics – Most Popular APIS for Effective Business Management
As one of the most popular APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), Google Analytics has become a must-have application for business websites. It helps you to keep track of your website visitors. Keeping track of web traffic will help you make effective future decisions.
You can also monitor other data, such as conversion rates and customer lifetime value. You can also track the back end of your website and dashboard. Google Analytics allows you to track the sales funnel at various stages.
#2 Google Geo-location (Google Maps) – Most Popular APIS to Show Locations
There are many ways one can leverage Google’s geolocation API for their advantage. You can embed maps that provide you the look you want, i.e., 360-degree, Streetview, etc. It can also help you show the route information with real-time traffic data.
#3 Google Fonts – Most Popular APIS for Stylish Typography
Google Fonts API is one of the most popular APIs recommended for fonts. This API enables you to avoid hosting clumsy font files on your server. Google handles all the load.
#4 Google Translate -Most Popular APIS for Languages
If you’re looking forward to building an international website, this API can be a boon. It helps your users to translate your website into their native language. Once your HTML is ready, this API will handle the rest of the things by itself.
#5 Google Calendar – Most Popular APIS for Planning Events
As a business, whether you want to conduct a person-to-person conversation or host various events, a calendar API will come in handy. Google Calendar has all the properties for becoming one of the most popular APIs. You can use Google Calander API to make instant connections and to display private or public events.
#6 G Suite Apps
G Suite apps have separate APIs for each of them. Today almost every business or e-commerce website has a contact form. You can use Google Sheets API to collect and organize customer information. It will help you consolidate every lead and help sales reps get an overview of customer requirements and prepare for the call beforehand.
#7 YouTube – Most Popular APIS for Videos
Videos are the best way to engage your audience. However, uploading video files to your server every time when you want to upload video content is not a good idea.
Using the most popular APIs, such as YouTube API, you can easily embed the video player into your site and customize the playback settings. It can also help you to fetch videos from your YouTube channel to your website dashboard without hesitation.
#8 Vimeo
Vimeo is the second most popular video-sharing platform with its standalone API. If you use Vimeo to share video content, then using this API, you can embed videos on your site, customize playback, and pull the data.
#9 Facebook Messenger – Most Popular APIS for Social Media
Chatbots are a great way to engage with your customers. There are many Chatbot service providers out there. Unlike most of them, Facebook Messenger is a free API that allows you to integrate Chatbot into your website. It can interact with multiple visitors simultaneously, which increases customers’ experience by reducing their wait times. Moreover, it can also help your customers to connect with real people.
#10 Facebook Apps and Plugins
This set of Facebook APIs allows you to take more out of your social media marketing efforts. It helps users to log in through Facebook, embed social media posts on the website, and track website conversion through Facebook.
#11 Twitter
Similar to Facebook, Twitter also has its API. Facebook and Twitter are the two most popular social media APIs to integrate into your website.
Twitter API is a bit lighter than Facebook. You can use this API to embed Twitter posts, feeds, and share buttons to your site.
#12 Twilio
Twilio API is used to empower businesses by integrating AI bots, voice, SMS, or chatbots into your website. It can help visitors schedule appointments from the website itself and help them receive reminders for the scheduled appointment via SMS.
Like a free SaaS trial, you can include additional fields like name, company name, company size, contact number, etc. in the signup form. As soon as a visitor fills up the form, a sales rep can contact them immediately via phone.
#13 Most Popular APIS for File Storage – Dropbox
Facing a problem with file storage? Use the most popular APIs for keeping data. Dropbox API is here for you. It can handle complex tasks such as uploading visitors’ documents and e-sign the uploaded documents.
#14 MailChimp
With MailChimp API, you can increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. Connecting your website contact form with the API allows you to manage email lists and automate how your website and email work together.
#15 Stripe and PayPal – Most Popular APIS for Payment
There is no reason for you to process the payments manually when you have payment processors like PayPal and Stripe. Integrating such payment processor APIs help, you not only to collect payments but also to handle refunds, enable tracking, and more.
#16 SendGrid – Most Popular APIS for Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the essential elements of digital marketing. One might also have to send transactional emails, which are different from marketing emails.
Through SendGrid, you can send targeted emails to your customers without any hazel. Using it, you can set triggers, send account confirmations, password reset emails, receipts, and more.
#17 Slack
Slack is one of the leading communication tools in the industry. Using Slack API, you can get unlimited benefits of the tool right on your website.
You can access channel history, post messages, listen to real-time events, deploy workflows, incorporate builds, and more. It will help everyone keep on the same page.
#18 Amazon S3
Businesses should always look for storage and hosting solutions that are reliable and scalable. With Amazon cloud storage, you don’t have to worry about cloud storage. With Amazon S3 API, you can allow third-party users to upload files to your storage bucket directly; it provides options for versioning and replicating files. VIDIZMO’s enterprise video streaming platform not only supports AWS video streaming but also uses Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Transcribe APIs to analyze a large number of videos stored in Amazon S3, detecting objects, faces, sentiments, keywords, as well as getting transcription from voice, and giving appropriate tags to your videos.
#19 Stormpath and Okta
If you want to build a website where users can register, this API is a boon for you. It is highly secured and allows users to also log in through Facebook. It maintains user profiles, handles forgotten password flow, and provides authorization roles. Stormpath supports login through Google, Github, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Recently, Stormpath joined forces with Okta.
#20 FullContact
FullContact API is one of the most popular APIs handling user information. It provides you the data about the person behind an email address. This information will help you segregate the person’s name, Facebook ID, Twitter username, phone number, and more. You’ll help your sales team by integrating this API into your website. Despite being an old-school API, it is worth it.
#21 Microsoft Cognitive Services
If you’re willing to include AI capabilities in your application, then Microsoft Cognitive Services is the API that every developer should consider. Using it, you can access features like advanced image cognitive services. This feature helps you to recognize a particular image crawling through the entire Internet.
#22 Master of Linguistics – Most Popular APIS for Global Websites
If you want to capture the global market, you must offer integrated translation services on your application. Master of Linguistics is one of the most popular APIs that can help you with languages. This API can allow users to translate English to Russian with a single click.
The latest version of the API is a one-stop shop for all problems related to the babelese scope. Moreover, it can determine which language a specific text is in.
#23 Off-screen Canvas
Earlier, developers used a technique to render graphics without flickering, which is known as double buffering. Google did something similar to their API. Google developers built an off-screen window where graphics can be “staged” at high performance.
#24 NASA – Most Popular APIS with Space Images
In earlier Windows phones, Microsoft used to provide space wallpapers and screen savers to the users. Pictures of spares are pretty popular, and everyone likes them. Since everyone wants space images, why not pick them directly from the source? NASA API is a never-ending store for space pictures.
#25 Payment Request
If you’re building an e-commerce website, then you must be willing to make the payment checkout experience as smooth as possible for a user. Payment Request API allows you to deliver the flawless user experience. It also allows a user to choose the payment method. It has a functionality to set variable prices based on the shipping address.
#26 CSS Layout
CSS decides how your website will look like. The chances of error increases when a website’s CSS is not following a standard template. These APIs help developers create their layout modules, similar to the grid module or flex modules that we use today. After defining the rules, the Layout API can place the items anywhere within the defined elements.
#27 Credential Management
If you’re thinking of providing signup and login options to users, then consider the Credential Management API. It will help your users to log in through the credentials stored in a browser. It will help users to log in to your application without manually entering any credentials. This API gets triggered as soon as a user visits/opens your website.
#28 CSS Paint
Developers usually get very few opportunities to change how the browser decides to render a webpage other than directly updating the DOM. This API provides developers access to the render pipeline in the browser via JavaScript, which helps them to finetune the browser’s operations to their needs.
#29 Writable Files
The long term goal of a web app is to bring it to the same level as its native counterparts. Currently, writing a file includes creating a download and saving it to a specific directory, which is a tedious process. This API provides more flexibility to developers and enables a user to decide where the files should be stored. It will help programmers to do more fully featured web development projects.
#30 Generic Sensor
As the name suggests, it is an API that allows a developer to access the sensors present on a mobile device. This API is a ‘generic’ API, which means that it can call any sensor present in the mobile device. There is no need to add different APIs for different sensors.
#31 Web Speech
This API is divided into two parts – speech synthesis and speech recognition. The SpeechSynthesis object gives access to different options. The SpeechRecognition object detects the speech of humans.
The speech synthesis part is supported by most of the browsers, whereas the recognition part is supported by Firefox (with a flag enabled) and Chrome (with a prefix).
The community has been discussing to expand the recognition part of the API to include other inputs. It will help to provide a real-time closed caption of a video conference, which will help more people around the world to connect with you.
Bonus
IFTTT and Zapier are APIs worth considering. They allow you to create recipes or conditions that connect your website with existing APIs. It’ll allow you to determine actions you would want to take when a particular instance occurs.
Most Popular APIs – Wrapping Up
The above list covers a majority of APIs that can help you get the most out of your website. Integrating these APIs will not only delight your customers but also help you manage them properly.
Please, note that MotoCMS templates include almost all the described APIs (in-built Google Analytics, Google Maps, various fonts, calendar, social media integration buttons, payment gateways, etc.) so that it’ll be much easier for you to launch your site successfully and make it work for you. All the themes are niche-oriented which guarantees you’ll get the site tailored to your target audience’s needs, just choose the necessary category and start searching for the very template!
Please, check out the latest website builder updates, maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for:
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