Step 1: Tell the tool where you are

Everything starts from a position. Three options, best first:

• Use My Location. Your browser asks for permission once; the coordinates never leave your device and aren’t stored anywhere. Best outdoors or near a window — GPS needs a view of the sky, and indoors the position can wander by tens of metres. Details in the privacy policy.
• Choose a city. Faster, and no permission needed. Good enough if you’re anywhere near the city centre — a few kilometres of error moves the bearing by a fraction of a degree at UK distances.
• Enter coordinates. Most precise if you know them, and the only option that works with the location turned off entirely. See the angle calculator for the format.

Step 2: Read the bearing

The tool shows one number: the bearing in degrees, clockwise from true north. In London it reads 119.0°. That’s your answer in its most useful form — everything else on the page is a way of turning that number into a direction.

A note on true north vs magnetic north: the bearing is measured from true north, but many compasses (including phone sensors) work in magnetic north. The gap between them — magnetic declination — is small in Britain, a degree or two, but it exists and it varies by place and year. If you’re transferring the bearing to a physical compass, look up your local declination and adjust. The dial on this site handles the distinction itself where sensor data allows.

Step 3: Face the direction

On a phone

Hold the phone flat, screen up, and turn your body until the gold Qibla marker sits at the top of the dial. Then the top edge of the phone points along the bearing. Two caveats: iPhone needs a permission tap before the dial goes live (Safari asks on first use), and metal nearby — railings, car bonnets, phone cases with magnetic mounts — bends the reading. If the dial jumps around, step away from the metal or switch to the map method below.

On a desktop or laptop

There’s no live dial — laptops have no heading sensor, and we won’t fake one. Use the bearing plus the map: find the line, pick a landmark along it (a street, a building, a fence line), and face that landmark. Or take the degrees to a real compass, correcting for magnetic declination as above.

Sanity checks before you pray

• Does the number look right for your country? From Britain the bearing is always around 113–121° (south-east). If yours reads wildly different, the position is wrong — re-enter it.
• Is the dial behaving? A healthy compass reading changes smoothly as you turn. If it spins, lags, or freezes, the sensor is unreliable: calibrate (figure-of-eight motion, away from metal) or use the map.
• Do two methods agree? The dial and the map should point the same way. If they don’t, trust the map and investigate the compass — see compass not working.

Related

• Qibla finder — the compass tool itself.
• How the Qibla direction is calculated — where the bearing number comes from.
• Qibla compass not working? — when the dial misbehaves.
• Qibla direction in the UK — precomputed bearings for 20 UK cities.