The dialog, tab by tab

Open it with Web → QGIS2WebMap by NIKA → Create web map, the toolbar button, or Ctrl+Alt+W (Cmd+Alt+W on macOS). To change the shortcut, search for Create web map in Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.

The dialog is non-modal: QGIS stays usable behind it. Reorder, rename or restyle layers in the Layers panel and the plugin follows immediately. There is no refresh button because there is nothing to refresh.

Six tabs, and two things that stay on screen whichever tab you are on: the fidelity strip and the button row.

Settings are remembered per project, stored in the .qgz alongside it, so they travel with the project rather than following you between projects. The exceptions are remembered per machine instead, because they are habits rather than properties of a map: the last folder you exported to, and the Settings tab’s choices. The Settings tab gathers the per-machine ones you can change.

Map

Everything about the map as a whole, and the one place the exported title is set.

Map name

The first field in the dialog, and the only place the exported title comes from. It is shown on the map and in the browser tab.

Leave it blank to use the project title. The field is prefilled from Project Properties → General, falling back to the project file name and then to Untitled map, and typing here does not write back to the project — exporting a map should not quietly edit your project’s metadata.

Setting a name here does not by itself draw it on the map. That is the Map title switch on the Appearance tab, which is off by default.

Export

Choose what to make and where it goes, then press Export in the top-right corner.

Export as:

• Standalone HTML — one file that opens by double-clicking, with all of your data inside it. The default.
• Share ZIP — the same map zipped, with a short README. Use it when a mail filter blocks .html attachments.
• Folder — index.html, onlymap.js and a README side by side, to copy to a web server. A folder has to be served; it does not open by double-clicking.

Save to is where the export is written. Type a path or press Choose, which opens beside your project file, named after it. Switching the type keeps the name: peaks.html becomes peaks.zip or a peaks folder. Pressing Export writes there without asking again.

For a Standalone HTML export, a line underneath gives measured size advice: how large your map’s data actually is, and when the file would become slow to open or awkward to email.

A second line says what is on disk:

Both the type and the place are saved with the project.

Basemap

A backdrop drawn behind your data: None, OpenStreetMap, Positron, Dark Matter, Voyager, Liberty or Bright.

None is the default, and it is the only choice that keeps the export offline. Every other option means the recipient’s browser fetches tiles from that provider every time they open the map — so the provider sees those requests, including roughly where the reader is looking. The Fidelity tab names the provider. Nothing else changes: no identifier travels with the file, the anonymous usage report is the same either way, and the file is no larger.

OpenStreetMap only works for maps on a website. Its tile servers refuse a map opened straight from a file, so a recipient who double-clicks a Standalone HTML or Share ZIP export may see “Access blocked” tiles. The dialog warns under the basemap when you pick it for those types; choose Liberty instead - the same OpenStreetMap data, drawn a little differently - or export as a Folder.

Ground surface sits in the same group because it costs the recipient the same thing. Flat is the default; Global relief tilts the map so elevation shows, and fetches terrain tiles to do it. With a basemap chosen too, the basemap’s imagery drapes over the relief — mountains that look like the map, with your symbology painted onto the slopes. The warning under the control names every host the relief streams from.

Basemaps needing an API key are deliberately absent. An exported file would have to carry the key in plain text where every recipient could read it.

Data

Open the map on — where the map is positioned when someone first opens it. The data frames every feature; the current QGIS view uses your canvas as it stands. Either way the reader can pan and zoom anywhere afterwards.

Export only the features in this view is a separate decision, and folding the two together is exactly how you would ship a map missing everything outside your working extent. This one removes data: anything outside the current QGIS view is left out of the file. It is the practical way to bring a very large layer under the free plan’s 25,000-feature limit, and the Fidelity tab reports how many features each layer loses.

Coordinate precision — the only setting in the dialog that throws data away, which is why it defaults to Maintain full precision. Rounding coordinates makes the file smaller and cannot be undone. Six decimal places is about 0.1 m at the equator. When you choose it, the fidelity report says so.

The summary line

At the bottom of the tab, a plain sentence saying what the map file will contain, given every choice above. It is a consequence, not a setting.

Layers

One list, driven by the QGIS Layers panel, bottom layer first — the same order the map draws in.

The three columns

The i at the bottom right of the tab sums these up.

Two of these matter beyond tidiness:

• Unticking Popups is how you keep attribute data out of a map you are sending someone. The values are not hidden — they never reach the file, so there is nothing to recover by opening it in a text editor.
• Unticking Include or Popups makes the file smaller, which matters because the map file carries all of its data inside it.

Unticking any box affects that layer only. The map still works, with less on it.

Per-field popup settings

Expand a layer to list its fields. Each gets its own setting:

One exception, and it is deliberate. A field the map draws with — the one a categorised or graduated style is based on, the one labels read their text from, or an extrusion height — stays in the file even when you hide it. Removing it would conceal nothing, since it is visible on the map either way; it would only break the drawing.

Set every field to … Apply to all layers

A bulk action for the tedium of setting a dozen layers by hand. It is a button rather than a live combo because it overwrites every field in every layer and should not fire on a stray scroll.

The list follows QGIS

Reorder, rename, add, remove, group or hide a layer in the QGIS Layers panel and this list rebuilds. Per-layer settings survive that rebuild — they are keyed to the layer, not to the row — and settings for a removed layer are kept, so undoing the removal in QGIS restores its configuration too.

Appearance

How the map looks to the reader. Everything here is on by default: an exported map should be useful without configuring anything.

Map controls

Four switches — Legend, Layer switcher, Zoom controls, Scale bar. Untick one to leave that control off the exported map.

The layer switcher is the one exception to that. It only appears when the map has more than one thing to switch between, so a map with a single unlabelled layer does not get one however this is set — there would be nothing in it but a single ticked box. Turning labels on counts: a labelled layer travels with its labels as a second entry, which you can then show and hide on their own.

Caption

Both off by default, because an unwanted caption drawn over someone’s map is worse than a missing one.

• Map title draws the map name over the map. The legend drops its own heading while this is on, so the title never appears twice.
• Project description draws the abstract from Project Properties → Metadata. Nothing appears if the project has none.
• Position places the caption. All four corners already hold controls — switcher top left, legend top right, zoom and scale bottom left, credit bottom right — so the two centre positions are the only genuinely clear space, and they are listed first.

Control colours

Background and Text and icons apply to the legend, layer switcher, zoom controls and scale bar. Both start unset, meaning use the map’s own styling; leave them that way and a default export is unchanged.

Size scales the legend, layer switcher, zoom controls, scale bar and title together — Small through to Largest, for presentations and big screens. The credit stays fixed, so attribution cannot be shrunk out of legibility.

Behaviour

Open popups on hover instead of click replaces click rather than adding to it. Bound together, a click on an already-open popup appears to do nothing.

Highlight under the cursor is the colour shown when the reader’s pointer is over a feature. Keep some transparency — a solid colour hides whatever the feature is drawn on top of. Leave it unset for the default, a see-through white.

Fidelity

The reason this plugin exists. It answers one question — what does my recipient not get? — before you export, not after.

The report builds when you open the tab, reading every feature of every layer, so it takes a moment on a large project and shows a progress bar while it does. Preview and Export read the project too, and refresh the report as they go.

One line at the top sums it up — 5 layers · 1 needs attention · 10 things change. A layer needs attention when something about it is Blocked or Not exported. Below it the report is grouped, problems first:

• Whole map — settings that belong to no one layer: the basemap, relief, where the map opens, its title. Its own line describes the whole map: how many layers and features, roughly how much data, the output, where the map opens and its basemap.
• One group per layer, the layers that lose something before the layers that are only changed. A layer that comes through exactly is a single ✓ exact line. Each layer’s own line says what it is: its geometry and feature count, how it is styled and on which field, its labels, how many fields its popups show and how many go into the file, the zooms it shows at, and how much data it adds.
• Every row has its whole sentence in the Detail column.
• Rows saying the same thing about several classes of one layer are merged into one, with the number of classes. Expand it to see each class.

Select a row to see it in the pane below the list, with the classes it applies to. Where the fix is in this dialog, the pane has a button that goes there: Show in Layers for a layer, Go to Map tab for the basemap and the other map settings.

Filter, beside the summary, chooses what the list shows — one tick per verdict, each with how many rows it has, and one per topic: Symbology, Labels, Popups & fields, Data and Map settings. The menu stays open while you tick, and the button says how many rows are folded away. The search box finds rows by any word in them, or a layer by its name or by what it is (“polygons”, “labels from”). Kept rows are hidden by default so the changes stand out; tick Kept to bring them back. Your choices are remembered. Filtering only folds rows away: the counts at the top and in the strip are always about the whole report.

When something changes after a check — a layer ticked or unticked, the map renamed, a layer added, restyled or edited and saved in QGIS — the report is marked Out of date rather than going on looking current. Check again refreshes it.

If the check itself fails, the tab says so and why. That is not a verdict: it says nothing about your map, only that the check did not finish.

Worth reading before you send a map on.

Settings

Things that are true of every project, rather than of one map:

• NIKA account — who this copy of QGIS is signed in as. Publishing to NIKA needs an account; exporting a file never does.
• Language — Follow QGIS (the default), English, or one of Português (Brasil), 中文（简体）, हिन्दी, Español, العربية and Français. English is built in; the others are a small download the first time you pick one, checked against the copy released with this version. Follow QGIS uses the language QGIS is set to when it is one of these, and otherwise English. When QGIS is in one of them and its pack is not downloaded yet, a bar at the top of the dialog offers it — nothing is downloaded until you press it. Switching reopens the dialog in the new language; QGIS does not need a restart.
• Appearance — the dialog’s theme: Follow QGIS, Light or Dark.
• About — the plugin version and the OnlyMap runtime it is pinned to.

Help

The same guides you are reading now, bundled into the plugin and rendered offline. Open the full documentation opens this site in your browser.

The fidelity strip

Between the tabs and the buttons, always visible, whichever tab you are on:

• 3 things change on export. — or
• 1 layer cannot be exported. — or
• nothing at all.

Nothing at all is the good case. A permanent “0 things change” trains people to stop reading it, so a clean export says nothing and the absence is the message. What changes? jumps to the Fidelity tab.

The button row

Preview, Share and Export

All three sit in the top-right corner of the tab bar, so they are within reach whichever tab you are reading.

Preview builds the map and opens it in your default browser. Nothing else in the plugin opens a browser, and a preview never writes your map file - only Export does.

The dot at Preview’s right end is the live switch; hover it to see which way it is set. Off (a grey ring), Preview opens the map as it is now - press it again after changing something. On (red), Preview serves the map from your own machine and the tab updates by itself as you change settings, keeping your position on the map. While that runs the button reads Live; press it again, or close the tab, to stop. The switch stays red - it is a habit, remembered on this machine - so the next press starts a live preview again.

If a live preview cannot be served — a firewall, a locked-down machine — it opens as a file instead and tells you so.

Export writes the map in the type and place chosen on the Map tab. It is the filled button, last in the row, because it is what the plugin is for.

Share is everything else you might do with the finished map. Pressing it opens the menu:

Copy file path and Show in file manager need a Save to path first. Until you have set one on the Map tab they are greyed out, and each says so if you hover it. Publish with NIKA hosting and Ask on Discord always work; the rows marked coming soon are greyed out.

Show in file manager writes the map first when it is missing or out of date, so it never points at something stale. Copy file path only copies the path, so it never waits for a write.

Preview, Export and Share’s file rows are greyed out when the map cannot be produced correctly, with the reason in the bar at the foot of the dialog rather than a silent refusal:

Progress and Cancel

A bar appears only while something is running, naming the layer it is on, with Cancel beside it. Its appearance is the signal that work is happening rather than that the plugin has hung. One job runs at a time: pressing Export twice does not export twice.

Next

• Your first export — the same ground as a walkthrough
• What gets exported — what each verdict is based on
• Sharing a map — which Share row to reach for, and why
• Troubleshooting — when a control is not doing what this page says