The Steps To Install Site Kit WordPress Plugin By Google For Website

The good news is that anyone with a WordPress website can now easily Install Site Kit by Google. May it be for a small or large business site, or even for a newbie to an advanced webmaster, Google Site Kit can significantly help. And now, in this guide, we are going to explain in detail how and why. At the end of October, Google announced the release of its new plugin.

Something which brings all of your favorite site metrics and data into one place within your WordPress dashboard. The plugin had previously been in beta mode but is now available to download. Basically, the Site Kit by Google is very new. However, it has, definitely, been branded as a plugin that enables you to set up and configure key Google service solutions easily.

And, as a result, you’ll get insights into how people find and use your website. As well as learn how to improve, and easily monetize your content. Of course, if you’re new to AdSense, one of your first tasks is to connect your website to AdSense, right? Well, if that’s where you are now, we highly recommend you use Site Kit for WordPress by Google to achieve that.

So, are you a WordPress user looking to monetize your site with AdSense? Bearing in mind, that the Google Site Kit Plugin can connect your WordPress website to your AdSense account right away. And then, place the AdSense code on all your pages for you. So you can show ads automatically across your site. But, there’s much more to what it can do for you…

What The New Site Kit By Google Entails

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site (learn more). It’s the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard.

More so, for easy access, and all for free. Realistically, what most webmasters and website owners love most about it is that: The Site Kit plugin is free and open source and will remain so. However, it’s worth mentioning that all individual Google products included in the Site Kit are subject to standard terms and fees (if any) for those products.

That said, Site Kit includes powerful features that make using Google products seamless and flexible. Whilst not intended for in-depth data reporting, it’s useful for providing developers with a quick and easy data-based website performance overview.

You’ll Get Data Access For:

Google Search Results Console
GA (Google Analytics) Property (V4)
Google Optimize Plus Tag Manager
PageSpeed Insights Toolkits
Google AdSense Platform

As an example, you can Install Site Kit by Google and then use it within a staging environment. You can try out Site Kit on your safe staging environment, while still pulling in real data from your production site. But, if you want to use Site Kit with your staging environment, you’ll need to activate it separately. The best part? You can do all of this directly from WordPress.

It’s also important to realize, there is even a complete guide on how to use Site Kit with a staging environment. But, it’s only for sites that have a staging environment and a production site. Whereby, the staging site displays the production site data. Some of its key features include easy-to-understand stats directly through your WordPress website admin dashboard.

Additionally, you’ll also have official stats from multiple Google tools, all in one dashboard, and a quick setup for various Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site. There are also metrics for your entire site and for individual posts. It also comes with an easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products, etc.

What’s more, with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights, you’ll also be able to improve performance. As you also track how many people saw your site in search results. And even know what query they used to search for your website. In addition, when you Install Site Kit by Google, it’ll help you to show key metrics and insights from all other Google products.

The Main Site Kit Product Addon Features Include:

Analytics: Explore how users navigate your site and track the goals you’ve set up for users to complete
AdSense: Keep track of how much your overall website is earning from the monetization program
Tag Manager: Easily set up and manage website tracking tags — no editing skills required
Optimize: Easily set up A/B Testing rules to optimize your website — no additional coding skills are required
PageSpeed Insights: See how your web pages perform compared to other real-world websites to improve performance
Search Console: Learn how SERPs by Google discovers and displays your web pages in search results

So, what are some of its benefits? Well, there are quite a number of other benefits that you’ll enjoy once you install Site Kit by Google. We assume that you have already configured Search Console and Google Analytics on your WordPress website. If not, then we recommend you first set up both Google Analytics and Google Search Console before you install Google Site Kit.

Some reasons why you should connect the other tools first:

First, while Google Site Kit can configure a new account for your WordPress website in each of its services, we think that you should refrain from doing so.
Secondly, we like to think that the Google Site Kit plugin’s primary job is to connect (or link) your WordPress website to other various Google services (be it Search Results Console, Google Analytics 4 Property, or even Tag Manager).
Last but not least, we believe that setting up Search Console and/or Google Analytics in the manual method gives you a much better understanding of each tool and marketing analytics in general.

But, there are other reasons why integrating the brand-new Google Site Kit Plugin with it’s other main solution services for webmasters is a good fit for your WordPress website in general. Suffice it to say, you should connect your AdSense account to your Google Analytics account to get the most out of the new Google Site Kit Plugin in terms of revenue performance.

The Main Benefits You’ll Enjoy If You Install Site Kit By Google

By all means, nothing is as easy as managing a WordPress website database content all under one roof. That’s why, if you install Google Site Kit Plugin on your WordPress website, it’ll become easy to access all other data sets. Especially, from its other complimentary application platforms like GT4, Search Console, Tag Manager, AdSense, etc.

Perse, one of the most useful benefits of the Google Site Kit Plugin is its ability to display your site’s data at an (a) overview or aggregate level, as well as (b) at an individual level for posts and pages. Not to mention, the latter is super helpful in gaining post/page-level insights across multiple Google properties, and all this directly through your WordPress dashboard.

As well as helping in saving you loads of new tabs, clicks, and most importantly, time. Uniquely, Site Kit includes powerful features that make using these Google products feel so seamless and flexible.

Consider some of the following key elements:

Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
Official stats from multiple Google tools, all in one dashboard
Quick setup for multiple Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site
Easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products
Metrics for your entire site and for individual posts, and much more…

Fortunately, Google just made integrating its products with WordPress easier. Its new Site Kit Plugin lets you access essential metrics and insights directly from your website’s back end. Below are some other benefits you’ll get as soon as you are ready to download the plugin, install it, and activate it so that you can use it on your WordPress website as a newbie user.

1. Management Solution For Site Owners

If you have a WordPress website and would like to see how users find and use your website, Site Kit is right for you. To help you build, maintain, and grow your online presence, Site Kit gives you easy-to-understand metrics. As well as actionable insights directly on your WordPress dashboard.

You’ll also easily understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard. From page speed testing to analytics, Google tools play a pivotal role in the management, maintenance, and optimization of WordPress sites. However, one pitfall of using third-party services is that they cause minor delays in an otherwise efficient workflow.

The solution is to use the official insights from multiple Google tools under one roof. And with a quick setup for numerous Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site. Once you install and activate Google Site Kit, you can configure the settings as necessary. You will be able to control and customize which insights your clients are able to view.

What’s more, your customers don’t have to edit the source code to set up Google tools. And there is more added value for your platform. Your customers get important information about how their site is performing right in your own dashboard. With flexible UI, you can pull stats from the plugin dashboard and display stats natively in your platform’s UI.

2. Integrate Webmasters And Content Hosts

If you work on a WordPress website for a client, Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. You’ll get aggregated insights from Google products. And all these are distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access.

No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients. The site performance stats and improvement recommendations come directly from Google. Therefore, your customers will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products. Site Kit provides roles and permissions to help you manage access to the site’s data.

And then again, to make sure only the relevant people can see stats. What about the web hosts? Well, if you work on a plugin or hosting provider, Site Kit provides a scalable, easy way for your users to provision and access key Google tools and metrics. With easy connection to official Google tools.

3. Manage Your Website Users Easily

There’s a whole host of issues that can stem from having too many plugins on your WordPress sites, including an increased risk of security and compatibility issues as well as slow loading times. Therefore, the fewer you have, the better. One of the benefits of using Site Kit as a developer is that it eliminates the need to use a separate plugin for each of the Google tools.

As well as other key products by Google that we all heavily rely on. By consolidating them, you don’t have to worry about an abundance of extensions slowing your clients’ websites down. Since it’s developed by Google, it’s safe to assume that Site Kit is lightweight and optimized according to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices.

While you can use it with similar existing plugins, it’s not recommended. For example, if you’re using MonsterInsights For Google Analytics, it’s not necessary to keep it activated alongside Site Kit. Doing so could cause compatibility issues.

4. Seamless Dashboard Workflow

As a web developer, Site Kit can increase your efficiency by streamlining your workflow in various ways. We just discussed how it eliminates the need for multiple plugins. In that sense, it saves you time by negating the issue of managing a greater number of updates. Additionally, Google Site Kit eliminates the need to access multiple dashboards.

The plugin displays all the stats you need to view directly in the WordPress back end. Gone are the days when you need to log into third-party external sources to view reports and stats for each platform. The time you save can now be better spent on more pressing business matters, such as improving customer service and tending to essential client project tasks.

It’s also worth noting that Google Site Kit lets you access multiple accounts from a single page in your dashboard. With all this information available in WordPress, you won’t need to go digging for specific stats and reports. Everything you need is readily available in charts and summaries that are easy to locate and understand.

5. Target The Right Website Visitors

On a clear note, the plugin helps improve your customer satisfaction. And as a WordPress developer, you’re likely no stranger to the importance of maintaining a healthy level of communication with your clients. The more transparency you have, the more likely it is that your customers will trust you and appreciate the value of your services.

Fortunately, the data and insight Site Kit provides make establishing that level of transparency with your clients even easier. It can do this through advanced reporting and by alerting WordPress admins anytime a milestone is reached. Google Site Kit can lead to quicker, more meaningful, and more accurate reporting. Thanks to the ease of access it provides.

And by that I mean, you’re less likely to fall victim to human error. Particularly, when transferring and translating data and information from third-party dashboards. It also aggregates data for easy client data access. Rather than manually gathering information and compiling the reports yourself.

How To Install Site Kit By Google For WordPress Websites

To begin with, Google announced its Site Kit Plugin For WordPress in WordCamp US 2018, and a year later, they released the developer preview on June 2019. Fast forward to 2021, the plugin is active in over 900,000+ sites. The best thing is that: Installing the plugin is a pretty standard process. And, we’ll look at the simple steps shortly.

And, just as we aforementioned, Site Kit is a free-of-charge, open-source plugin for WordPress that helps you access unified metrics and insights from Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights directly from your WordPress account. Simply put, in the left navigation menu, click the ‘Plugins‘ option.

And then click the ‘Add New‘ tab. Thereafter, enter “Site Kit” in the search bar. You should see the Google Site Kit Plugin on a search results page. After that, Install and Activate the plugin. And then Connect your Site Kit to your Google account. In order to successfully install and use Site Kit, your website must meet certain requirements.

Consider the following requirements:

WordPress version 4.7 or above plus PHP version 5.6+
A modern Web Browser like the Edge, Chrome, or Firefox – Internet Explorer is not currently supported
Is publicly accessible – it isn’t in maintenance mode, accessible only via password, or otherwise blocked
REST API is available – Site Kit must be able to communicate via REST API with Google services
- To ensure that the REST API is available for your site, go to Tools > Site Health
This is, especially, important for beginners so that they’ll know the reason why the plugin fails on their website.

Currently, only users with admin-level access to WordPress can set up and use the Site Kit plugin. In that case, this guide explains the permission levels for Google tools when used with Site Kit. Such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, or even AdSense. To Install Site Kit By Google, firstly, you’ll need to log in to your WordPress website.

And then, secondly, make sure that your website meets all the mandatory requirements. Such as the website should be publicly accessible. Meaning, that it isn’t under any kind of maintenance mode or only accessible through a password. Similarly, you should also make sure that you’re using a staging environment in addition to your site production authoring.

Equally important, you should only use the Google account to which all your site’s properties such as Search Console or Analytics are linked. Otherwise, if you use a different email, the Google Site Kit Tool won’t be able to find the relevant properties and create new ones for your WordPress site. And, you’ll end up having a broken configuration with duplicate data.

Follow these simple installation steps:

Log into your WordPress Dashboard to get started
Go to Plugins → Add New options section
In the search box, type “Google Site Kit” and select it
Hit the ‘Install‘ button to load the plugin on your WP site dashboard
And then, click on the ‘Activate‘ button to run the plugin on your website
That’s it! The next thing is to go to the Plugin Settings panel for more actions

For professional webmasters, you can also use the other method for the same purpose. Whereby, you’ll need to visit the main WP plugins directory in order to download the plugin files first of all. And then, you can save these Zipped files at your best computer location. Thereafter, all you’ll need is to go back to your WordPress website dashboard and upload the files.

After that, you can follow the above steps to install and activate the plugin. With that in mind, once you activate the plugin, you’ll be prompted to start its setup process. So, just click on Start Setup to begin the setup process of the Google Site Kit plugin integration onto your WordPress website. For instance, let’s say you want to access your AdSense account.

In that case, after you’ve completed the setup, click Connect Service under the “AdSense” dashboard options tab. You can find this on the Site Kit dashboard or “Settings” tab (follow the instructions in the plugin). We recommend that you allow Site Kit to place the AdSense code, which will place the AdSense code for non-AMP and AMP versions of your website.

Learn More: Steps To Connect To AdSense And Show Ads On Your WordPress Website

Site Kit will ask for various permissions to access your connected Google services such as Search Console, etc. Click on Allow to proceed to the next step. Eventually, if there are multiple WordPress admins, keep in mind that each admin must connect their own Google account. Especially, in order to access the WordPress plugin from the dashboard.

The most important thing is to make sure that you sign in with the relevant Google account — use your personal email to sign in with it (it’s the master account for all your Google properties). And, when you connect your website to AdSense, you can choose to show ads as soon as your AdSense account is activated and start earning money from your content right away.

Note: In order to ensure that AdSense ads serve your website right, make sure you’ve enabled Auto ads in your AdSense account. In particular, since Site Kit does not have permission to make changes to your AdSense account settings. And, when your website is ready to show ads and has traffic, you’ll see your AdSense metrics in the “AdSense” tab of the plugin.

Upon successful configuration, you’ll see a screen popup that is much similar to the one that is shown in the image above.

This confirms the following:

You’re the proper owner of your site’s domain and your domain is configured in Search Console,
Site Kit can access your general Google Account data and your Search Console data,
It does not have access to data from other properties such as Google Analytics, etc.
This means that you’ll have to give individual permissions for each property that you want to link.

You can now click on the go to my dashboard option tab to return to your WordPress dashboard. Equally important, Site Kit can display data from your production website in the staging environment. To set up a Site Kit with a staging environment, make sure that you follow these instructions instead which have more elaborate information in detail.

The Key Performance Report Metrics You’ll Get

Simply put, Google Site Kit Plugin is the official WordPress tool from Google that helps design webmasters gather insights about how people find and use any given website. In other words, it’s the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the website successful on the realms of the World Wide Web (for managers and users).

It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free. You can connect or disconnect individual Google services to Site Kit by accessing the plugin’s settings. And, as of January 2021, Site Kit offers support to its six Google service solutions just as we mentioned above.

Including its Google Search Console, Analytics Property, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense, Optimize, and Tag Manager. You can view your active connections under the Connected Services under Site Kit → Settings. On that note, in order to connect more new Google services, go to the Connect More Services tab and select the service you want to connect.

Moving on, the Google Site Kit toolkit includes all the essential metrics and analytics needed to monitor and maintain some of the most important WordPress tasks for your client sites. This includes SEO reports, page speed performance, and PPC campaigns. Once you install and set it up, you can choose which services you want to integrate with WordPress.

Related Resource: Page CTR | How To Increase Your AdSense Click Rates

Let’s say you decide to add PageSpeed Insights, a popular and powerful tool that can help you enhance the performance of your client websites. Right from your client’s WordPress dashboard, Site Kit will provide you with a snapshot summary of the PageSpeed Insights tool. You will be able to see the analysis of the website’s homepage loading times.

Specifically, for both its mobile and desktop versions. Plus, Google Site Kit goes beyond providing overview data for your client sites. You can also search and analyze specific pages and posts. And as aforementioned, there are 3 types of sites that consistently perform well with AdSense ads implementation. Something that is worth noting down if you are just starting.

Site Kit displays metrics from multiple Google services to help you understand how your site is doing. Below is an overview of the different reports in Site Kit and what each report means. Including web traffic, search funnel, site popularity, site speed, and AdSense. The Admin Settings gives you an overview of the Site Kit plugin’s status and the ability to reset it.

1. Web Traffic

You can also choose to share anonymous plugin usage stats with Google to improve the development of the plugin. The option is disabled by default. That aside, it’s a very good idea to check who is linking to your site using the Google Search Console toolkit at all times. Precisely, when we talk of web traffic, we are talking about your website visibility.

Luckily, in order to view this report, just connect to Google Analytics through Site Kit. In general, this report helps you understand how people found your site, based on data from Analytics. To elaborate, the report covers a variety of metrics.

The report metrics include:

Referral: About people who found your site from a backlink on another site (sites linking to yours).
Organic: This allows you to see people who found your site from a search engine.
Direct: Your most loyal readers who typed your site directly into their browser, or who bookmarked your site.
Email: For example, a custom newsletter parameter to track how many people came to your site.
N/A or None: At times, this is when Google Analytics doesn’t know where the traffic is coming from.

Having said that, I highly recommend that you periodically review this report. In order to check for any significant changes in how people are finding your site. Other metrics to explore include your site’s bounce rate per traffic source.

This provides you with an overview of the users who have left your website after a single visit. As well as the time that people spend on your site per traffic source. For example, you can compare traffic coming from social channels versus search engines. And then, try to see if there are differences in how long people from each source spend on your site.

2. Search Funnel

Periodically, you should review and check for any unusual spikes or dips in clicks or impressions. A weekly rhythm of weekend dips, or dips or spikes over holidays, is normal. But, the big question is why did my site traffic drop? Well, if a beginner webmaster, you can always learn more about your site impressions and clicks in detail to gather more information.

You can find some answers here as well. The search funnel report shows you how many people saw and clicked your site in Google Search. Whereby, all this data comes from your Search Console and Google Analytics.

The report metrics include:

Impressions: How many people saw your site in Google Search results?
Clicks: How many clicks were clicked to your site links in Google Search results?
Unique Visitors: People who found your site on Google Search during a session on your site.
Goals: The number of goals that people completed on your site in a defined timeframe, as previously defined by you.

In addition to unique visitors, if a user visited your site more than once in a single session, it counts as the same user, which makes this data unique. Therefore, to view this metric, that’s why you need to connect your Google Analytics through Site Kit.

In the case of your site goals, for example, you can set up a goal in Analytics to track the number of people who clicked an “add to cart” button on your site. And as soon as they complete their process in the checkout, it’s, therefore, a goal achievement. Make sure that you learn more about how to set up a goal in Analytics with more elaborate guidelines.

3. Site Popularity

As we’ve seen earlier, one of the most useful features of Google Site Kit is its ability to view data from multiple Google services (such as Analytics and PageSpeed Insights) for individual posts and pages. To view this data, open the post or page in a new tab, while you’re logged into WordPress. Hover over the Site Kit button and a new tab will appear with page-level data.

Click on the ‘More Details‘ option to access the detailed data for that individual page. It’ll show the detailed page-level data, for that particular page, across Google services like Search Console, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights.

Wait a moment… Why is the site’s popularity included here? Well, this report helps you understand what people search for when they find your most popular pages. Based on data from Search Console and Analytics.

The report metrics include:

Top Search Queries: What people searched for when they saw your site in search results per impressions.
Most Popular Content: Your pages with the most views, including the top search query associated with the page.

However, there are some questions you’ll need to ask first like: Do the queries that showed your site match what you expected? Are the most popular pages the ones you expected? Do the search queries match what you’d expect people to search for when looking for your content? Consider using the search queries for inspiration for your future content creation.

4. Site Speed

By the same token, you’ll need to consider your website speed as one of the key factors for you to Install Site Kit by Google. And just like all your web traffic, it’s even more related to your site visibility too. So, in order to view this report, you’ll need to Connect PageSpeed Insights through Site Kit. It’s good if you have a developer or agency working on your website.

Since you can share this report with them. To help them understand and plan the next steps to improve their speed score. Not to mention, this report tells you how fast your homepage is, based on data from PageSpeed Insights. As you also check for any critical issues affecting the speed of your homepage. And if you’ll find any, just open the report to troubleshoot.

Your site score can range from slow, to average, and fast. Above all, I recommend you try to focus on improving your slow issues to score higher. Let’s say, from a low score of 10 to a high score of 50.

Then again, last but not definitely least, you need to consider Google AdSense among your site solutions. And when it comes to your site visibility under this option, you can also view the report metrics too. All you’ll need is to connect your AdSense through the Site Kit by Google. Bearing in mind, it’s so easy to earn money from your content with Google AdSense.

It’s, important to realize, that if you have visitors from the European Economic Area (EEA) or the UK, you might want to uncheck this option to make sure that you’re complying with Google’s EU user consent policy. You can change your settings for serving ads to users in the EEA and the UK after your AdSense account is approved.

What’s more, the Site Kit performance report tab shows you all of your website’s AdSense performance reports.

The report metrics include:

RPM: Your general site earnings per thousand page views.
Ad Impressions: The number of ads shown on your site.
Estimated Earnings: Close estimates of your recent account activities.
Top Earning Pages: The web pages of your site that earned the most money for a given period.

On the other hand, as for AdSense, to view metrics in the AdSense module, you’ll need to complete additional steps. Check out the AdSense documentation for more information and details on how to do that — everything from start to finish.

Summary Thoughts:

WordPress’ ubiquity and market dominance have made goliaths like Google release official plugins for the CMS. Today we’re looking at a more open, more inclusive integration of a variety of third-party services within a WordPress website, which ultimately benefits the end user. Google’s Site Kit is a brilliant example of this inclusive integration tool.

Going forward, it’d be great to see deeper integrations with YouTube Analytics and Google Ads, since a lot of online businesses spend considerable amounts of money on ads for paid content marketing and promotion. In other words, the Google Site Kit promises to make it easier for website owners to access and manage key services of their websites.

They also conduct analytics to increase the success of their online properties. So, this plugin can be particularly useful when you’re a WordPress developer. Having said that, you can learn more about Google tools that are right for you from its webmaster central blog. Sometimes, you may also decide to make your staging site live (move your site to production).

So, be that as it may, if you go along with your business and you get stuck, you can either Uninstall the Helper Plugin, try to Reset the Site Kit plugin, or even Uninstall Site Kit Plugin from your WordPress website altogether — that’s if you no longer wish to continue using it on your website. But, you can always Consult Us for more support before you can do that.