With the advancement of technology, more aspects of a business are being moved onto a website to facilitate better reach in a short period of time. Doing business online also means that things like inquiry and payments will happen online too. 

That means to maintain a website that is useful in the modern landscape, integration of third-party services into the website is essential. The process can be a tedious one and one might forget one or two crucial points when doing the integration. Which is why a step-by-step approach to adding popular third-party integrations is crucial. Let’s take a look at the steps to avoid any hiccups. 

Step 1 - Determine what is required: Different businesses have different third-party services needs. Understanding your unique needs is the first step to be taken in third-party integration. Carefully analyse what is needed, like a payment gateway, a chat bot, social media widget or an email tool. 

Step 2 - Choosing the service providers: Very third-party service providers have certain pros and cons. The best way to evaluate them is to see how easy the integration process is, what kind of payment model does the service provider offer, the security measures that the service provider has in place to facilitate safe transactions in case of payment gateways, do the services provided adhere to local laws, and does the service provider have a large enough server base to handle the traffic from your website. Attention to these details would help avoid future integration problems. 

Step 3 – API acquirement: Third-party services work through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). To use these APIs on your website, first review certain things like: 

1. Which API keys and OAuth tokens or any other mechanisms are needed to run the service.

2. The number of times a particular API can be called in a given period of time.

3. The number of interactions needed with URLs that make the service work.

Step 4 – API Key step-up: After determining which API keys are needed, the next step is to set them up. Generally, you would need to make an account with the third-party service provider and then go to their developer section to generate the API keys. After that store the keys at some secure environment variables or with some secret management service. It is not advisable to include the keys right into your own application’s source code. 

Step 5 – Local Testing: Once the keys have been set up, test their functionality in a local demo environment i.e., a test website. Conducting these tests is necessary to see if the APIs are returning the desired results and to address any errors that may happen. 

Step 6 – Final Integration and Monitoring: After the tests, you can use different ways to integrate the APIs and in connection the third-party services into your live website. Some popular ways are: 

1. Direct Backend Integration,

2. Pre-built Plugins,

3. JavaScript Libraries. 

Once the integration is complete, it is important to monitor the changes made. Real life operation would allow you to determine where further optimisation might be needed.

With that we conclude our short guide on third-party integration. If along the way, you feel stuck and need help then don’t hesitate to contact us!