Make.com HTTP Modiule

Manually crafting APIs requests using HTTP modules

Naresh Devineni

— 2 min read
Manually crafting APIs requests using HTTP modules

As you already know, the official apps on Make.com makes it really easy to work with popular services like Google Sheets, Convertio, Airtable, and a ton of other services.

But sometimes, you need to work with APIs that don’t have an official app on Make.com.

For example, I have a client who provides digital marketing services to 40+ doctors and also manages their websites.

As a responsible service provider, he sends monthly performance reports to his clients.

These reports include website performance metrics like:

  1. Page speed
  2. SEO Performance score
  3. Accessibility Score

And of course, he didn’t want to gather these metrics manually.

It’s time-consuming to do this for 40+ websites, right?

So, I suggested an automation that pulls these metrics automatically using the Google PageSpeed Insights API.

But when I looked for a PageSpeed Insights app on Make.com

Nothing. It wasn’t there.

Simply put, Make.com doesn’t have an official app for PageSpeed Insights.

And that’s not surprising because it's not the most widely used API out there.

So, I had to find a way to call the PageSpeed Insights API without an official app.

That’s when I came across Make.com’s HTTP app and its powerful modules.

Make.com's HTTP App with modules

These HTTP modules let you:

  1. Work with APIs that don’t have official apps
  2. Or bypass limitations in existing official apps

In upcoming lessons, we’ll use HTTP modules to build automations like:

  • PageSpeed Insights checker
  • Reddit scraper
  • LinkedIn scraper

But before we jump into that, you need to understand the core elements of a manual API request, such as:

  1. HTTP protocol
  2. URL
  3. Method
  4. Headers
  5. Query String
  6. Body type and message

Once you understand how these elements work together, you'll feel confident working with any API, even if there’s no official app for it.

HTTP module configuration settings

In fact, all Make.com apps use these core elements internally.

Without them, the official apps wouldn’t even exist.

So this isn't just about APIs without official apps.

It is foundational knowledge.

Anyway, in the next lesson, we will understand the purpose of HTTP protocol and why it matters when calling an API.

I am HTTPing you into the next lesson.

I will see you there.

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