The dialog, tab by tab
Open it with Web → QGIS2WebMap by NIKA → Create web map, or the toolbar button.
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.
Five 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. Two
exceptions are remembered per machine instead, because they are habits rather
than properties of a map: Live preview and the last folder you exported to.
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.
How to share it
Three mutually exclusive output modes. There is more on choosing between them in sharing a map.
| Mode | Produces | The recipient |
|---|---|---|
| Standalone HTML | One .html file |
Double-clicks it. Nothing else needed |
| Share ZIP | A .zip with the map and a short README |
Extracts it, opens index.html |
| Folder | index.html, onlymap.js and a README, side by side |
Serves it over http(s) |
Underneath is a line of measured size advice, not a generic warning: it reports how large your map’s data actually is and says when Standalone HTML would become slow to open or awkward to email.
Folder does not open by double-clicking. Browsers refuse to load the runtime
from a file:// page when it sits in a separate file, so a folder has to be
served. Pick Standalone HTML if you want something that opens off a disk.
Filepath
Where the export is written. Type a path or press Browse. The folder is remembered between exports.
The file is named after the map name, with anything that is not a letter, digit,
space, hyphen or underscore replaced — so a layer called Site A / B cannot
silently write into a subdirectory.
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 dialog warns in red when a basemap is set, and 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.
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.
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 pressing Export will produce, 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
| Column | Ticked | Unticked |
|---|---|---|
| Include | The layer is in the map | The layer is left out, and its data is never written to the file |
| Popups | Clicking a feature shows its attributes | Clicking does nothing, and the attribute values are not written to the file |
| Labels | The text you set in QGIS is drawn beside features | No text. The features themselves are unaffected |
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 most for Standalone HTML.
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:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Value only, no label | The value with no field name beside it |
| Label beside value — always show | Field name and value on one line, even when empty |
| Label beside value — only if it has data | The same, but the row disappears when the value is empty |
| Label above value — always show | Field name on its own line above the value |
| Label above value — only if it has data | The same, but hidden when empty |
| Do not show this field | The field’s values are removed from the file, exactly as unticking Popups does for the whole layer |
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.
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. It rebuilds when the project changes.
Three columns: the item, its verdict, and the detail. Long details open onto their own row when clicked. Problems are sorted to the top, because a report opening on a wall of Kept buries what matters.
| Verdict | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Blocked | The export must not proceed. Export stays disabled while this is present |
| Not exported | Cannot be represented, and was left out. The map is still produced |
| Changed | Exported, but approximated — the detail says how |
| Rasterised | Drawn as an image because the style has no live equivalent |
| Kept | Survives exactly as set in QGIS |
Worth reading before you send a map on, and essential before you host one: this tab is what names every layer over the free plan’s size limits.
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.— or1 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
Live preview
A per-machine habit, remembered between projects. Ticking it opens nothing on its own — it only decides what Preview does when you press it.
With it on, the map is served from your own machine and the open browser tab updates by itself as you change settings, keeping your position on the map. Change a colour or switch a layer off and watch it happen.
With it off, Preview writes a file and opens that. The tab only changes when you press Preview again.
If the preview cannot be served — a firewall, a locked-down machine — it falls back to a file automatically and tells you so.
Preview
Builds the map and opens it in your default browser. Nothing else in the plugin ever opens a browser.
Export
Writes the real artifact. Greyed out when the export cannot be produced correctly, with the reason beside it rather than a silent refusal:
| The reason says | Fix |
|---|---|
| Add a vector layer to the project to export. | The project has no exportable layer |
| Tick at least one layer to include. | Everything is unticked on the Layers tab |
| A blocked item | Open the Fidelity tab; it names the layer and why |
Open exported map
Enabled once an export succeeds. It opens the real file — the one you would send someone — rather than a preview copy, so what you check is what they get.
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 — choosing between the three output modes
- Troubleshooting — when a control is not doing what this page says