WP Plugins to display reviews from Google no longer work due to API keys issues

[PeteKernow]

I had a plugin which displayed reviews from my GMB page in a box on my homepage. This week it suddenly stopped working, just showed an error message about too many referalls (I forget the exact word, but it was like it had exceeded some daily limit, which seemed unlikely as I'm a one man therapy business).

Anyway I tried several other similar plugins and to get the necessary API key for them to work I find I now have to join Google Cloud, which I never had to do before, I just got the API by inspecting the code of my Google Places page. Has Google suddenly altered something? The embedded map still works OK but with the reviews plugin I get error message "API keys with referrer restrictions cannot be used with this API." But so far as I know I've removed all referrer restrictions, or restrictions anyway, I can't actually find the words "referrer restrictions" on the Google Cloud dashboards.

So is there any simple way for me to get an API key to work without messing with Google Cloud? I'd never even heard of Google Cloud before and it's clearly not intended to be used by anyone who's not an IT professional.

 

[PeteKernow]

SOLVED

I had a plugin which displayed reviews from my GMB page in a box on my homepage. This week it suddenly stopped working, just showed an error message about too many referalls (I forget the exact word, but it was like it had exceeded some daily limit, which seemed unlikely as I'm a one man therapy business).

Anyway I tried several other similar plugins and to get the necessary API key for them to work I find I now have to join Google Cloud, which I never had to do before, I just got the API by inspecting the code of my Google Places page. Has Google suddenly altered something? The embedded map still works OK but with the reviews plugin I get error message "API keys with referrer restrictions cannot be used with this API." But so far as I know I've removed all referrer restrictions, or restrictions anyway, I can't actually find the words "referrer restrictions" on the Google Cloud dashboards.

So is there any simple way for me to get an API key to work without messing with Google Cloud? I'd never even heard of Google Cloud before and it's clearly not intended to be used by anyone who's not an IT professional.

Actually I found a way around it without messing with Cloud, deleted the plugin and tried a different one which works fine! For this plugin I just got the places ID from Place IDs | Places API | Google Developers so dunno what was going on with the other plugin.

 

[Durandl]

Hey peter
Can you share which plugin you are using please?

 

[PeteKernow]

I had been using google reviews plugin by Adnan Usman, I have replaced it with the Google Reviews Widget by Rich Plugins which now works fine.

 

[djbaxter]

Yes I use the Rich Plugins one too and it still works for me.