Enterprises are focused on building great API portal experiences to drive increased consumption and reuse of their best APIs. Done right, this offers both cost avoidance and cost saving opportunities; by preventing new duplicate APIs being built and consolidating or deprecating redundant APIs.

There are some traditional blockers API consumers face when it comes to adopting existing APIs, including:

• Unreliable APIs and varying quality: often it’s easier for developers to build new than risk taking on the dependency of an existing API.
• Unintuitive and cluttered API portals: it’s hard for consumers to find APIs relevant to their use cases.
• Not enough information to evaluate the API properly: be that incomplete or out of date documentation, not enough detail for certain consumer audiences, or lack of good API mocking.
• No connection to the API provider: making it difficult to ask questions, request changes to the API, and/or request access.

Fortunately, the next generation of API portal tools are designed to overcome these barriers. Here are 7 key components to look for.

8 benchmarks of a great API portal that delights developers and drives API reuse

1. Portals must be easy to implement and customize

Your API portal must be easy to spin up and built on a flexible framework. This makes it cheap and low risk to experiment and get the portal experience right for your users.

Our ignite Platform’s Consumer Portals are built on flexible React frameworks instead of the traditional rigid Drupal approach. It’s quick and easy to create one or many portals – whichever suits your use case.

2. A great UI and UX (tailored to the consumer audience)

The portal needs to offer differentiated experiences. Your consumer audiences (e.g. internal vs partner) have different expectations and these need to be supported.

ignite offers complete configuration for your portals, from branding to functionality and views, helping you tailor experiences for all your consumer audiences.

3. Offer relevant APIs

Consumers need to be able to easily discover approved APIs that are suitable to them, across different runtimes and without distraction from irrelevant clutter. That’s why it’s best practice to have an independent catalog of ALL your APIs powering an API portal of your BEST APIs.

ignite makes it easy to publish relevant APIs to multiple portals from one centralized holistic catalog. Or, if you want to use one portal, access controls make it simple to curate which consumers can see which APIs.

4. Keep content fresh

API versions and their corresponding documentation and any attachments need to be kept up to date and active in your portal. This helps build trust in your developer audiences, in turn encouraging reuse as the first point of call.

ignite provides an active connection between the catalog and portal, syncing updates made to APIs and documentation in the catalog to what’s on offer to consumers in the portal.

5. The relevant granularity of API detail

Your consumer audiences will need different levels of information on your APIs. For example, internal developers may need technical views like the API’s existing lineage and dependencies, while external business consumers are more likely to need a high level view of a group of APIs in a product bundle.

ignite provides a secure connection to the holistic catalog so internal developers and technical users can access a more granular view of APIs in the portal, as well as supporting product bundles and business-oriented views like browsing APIs by capability model classification.

6. The right functionality for API consumers

Your portal should offer a one-stop-shop for everything your consumers need to find, understand and evaluate, collaborate on, and request access to available portals. This includes reliable API mocking and try it out functionality.

Our Consumer Portals offer all this functionality, as well as configurable API access request forms to give the API provider SLA requirements and more upfront, before they grant access to the API.

7. A connection with the API provider

A successful API portal builds and active, ongoing, and frictionless connection between the provider and consumer, building trust in your consumer audiences and helping them to influence the API’s roadmap.

ignite allows consumers to ask questions, request changes, and request access to your APIs from the portal. And providers can reply direct from the main catalog, all connected through a robust notification and email system so both stakeholders are always kept up to date.

8. API reliability and visibility guaranteed

Of course, these components are obsolete if your APIs exposed in the portal are not gold standard. Not only should the APIs themselves be complete, consistent, and reliable, but API documentation needs to be kept up to date, and consumers need visibility into upcoming API versions and changes which might affect their applications.

ignite’s holistic catalog and extended lifecycle management capabilities automate democratized and flexible governance to ensure you’re proud to put your brand logo to APIs exposed to consumers. If you can advertise coming-soon versions, you can provide visibility. You can also publish up-to-date documentation direct from the catalog for each new version.

Want to reinvent your API portal in just one hour?

Establishing all these components of a great API portal may seem daunting if you’re used to old-fashioned and rigid Drupal portals. That’s why we’re now offering an entry level tier of our ignite Platform to get you there faster.

ignite Lite offers a quick way to capture all your APIs into a catalog, and find and promote the best ones into your first API portal to start seeing API reuse benefits. Join our free 30 day pilot program now to get going in just one hour.