Implementing geolocation on websites

Improving user experience is never something that should be out of sight, monitoring user behavior gives us great insight as to where our website could use a little help and what areas are the most relevant in our websites.

Making websites location-aware will allow us to correctly tailor our content, promotions, and services for different types of crowds found in the countries we want to reach to, through geolocation we want to be able to create the most customized user experience possible by collecting all relevant information from users in different locations.

Also, implementing a geolocation feature on our websites will allow us to block out any locations considered as a threat to cybersecurity, it's known that some locations hold higher hacker rates than others. This could be used as a preventive measure to ensure that our information and structure will be protected as much as possible.

What is a Geolocation API?

A Geolocation API is a web service interface that allows applications to retrieve geographic location information about a device. This typically includes latitude, longitude, and sometimes additional data like altitude, speed, or direction. Geolocation APIs are widely used in web and mobile applications to provide location-based services, such as finding nearby places, mapping, or personalizing content based on the user’s location.

How Geolocation APIs Work

Geolocation APIs operate by gathering location data through various methods:

1. GPS: On mobile devices, GPS provides accurate location data based on satellite signals.
2. IP Address: Web applications can estimate a device’s location based on its IP address.
3. Wi-Fi Positioning: Devices can determine their location based on nearby Wi-Fi networks.
4. Cell Towers: On mobile networks, location can be approximated using the cell towers the device is connected to.

How does geolocation work?

The process of making a website or web application location aware is fairly simple and shouldn’t need too much programming activity. It’s done through the implementation of an API, basically, we introduce a piece of code into the website’s existing code. This API will be in charge of making requests for data such as continent, country, city, timezone, location coordinates, and more.

IPdata is known for providing a fast and reliable Geolocation API, in their website they have listed a few uses for IP Geolocation that we find to be very self-explanatory:

• To restrict access to your content to specific countries or continents.
• To redirect users to a country-specific or language specific site based on their location.
• To show users their local time.
• To show users their local weather. 
• To figure out where most of your users are if you're running an API.
• Fraud detection - determining if the country a user's card is from is the actual country they're in.
• To block high-risk countries, that is countries that have originated a lot of malware or attacks against your site.
• To automatically convert prices on your e-commerce store to the user's local currency and to display their currency symbol.

Implementing Geolocation APIs on websites or web applications has become more and more reliable for web developers and content marketers, their reliability and valuable information make it a functionality that shouldn’t be put in doubt and we recommend 100%. If you are interested in this feature, Rootstack is here to help you implement Geolocation into your website.

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