Google Site Kit is a free plugin made by Google that lives inside your WordPress admin area. It connects your website to four separate Google services and shows you all of their data in one place, so you can see how your site is performing without having to log into four different websites.

What Site Kit shows you

Site Kit pulls together data from four Google tools:

• Search Console, which tells you how your site is doing on Google’s search results: which queries people are typing, how often your site appears, how often they click through, and what position your pages are in.
• Google Analytics, which tracks your visitors: how many, where they came from, which pages they read, how long they stayed, and what they did before leaving.
• PageSpeed Insights, which measures how fast your pages load on phones and computers, and identifies what’s slowing them down.
• AdSense, which shows your earnings if you display Google ads on your site (most small business sites don’t, but it’s there if you ever do).

Without Site Kit, you would need to log into each of these tools separately. With Site Kit, the headline numbers from all four show up on a single dashboard inside WordPress.

Why this matters

Knowing how your website is actually performing is the difference between guessing and improving. Site Kit answers questions you cannot answer any other way:

• Which exact words are people typing into Google to find you? (Often a surprise. Customers frequently use phrases you would never have thought to put on your site.)
• Of the people who see your listing on Google, how many actually click on it? If your site appears 1,000 times but only 10 people click, your title and description are working against you.
• Which of your pages are pulling their weight, and which are dead ends?
• Are your pages fast enough on mobile? Google uses page speed as a ranking signal, so a slow site loses search position as well as visitors.
• Where are your visitors coming from geographically, and on what kind of device?

Once you can see all of that, you know what to change. You spot pages that rank well but have weak titles costing you clicks. You find search terms you should write a page for. You notice that your contact page is the most-visited page but visitors are leaving from there, which tells you something is wrong with the form or the layout. The site stops being a guess and starts being a tool you can improve with confidence.

Who can use Site Kit

Site Kit lives inside the WordPress admin area, so only people with admin access to the site can see its data. In practice this means one of two arrangements:

• If you take a monthly maintenance plan with me, I keep the WordPress admin access. I read the Site Kit data on your behalf and turn it into a proper monthly report on where your traffic is coming from and what would help it grow.
• If you run the site yourself, you have admin access and you can log into Site Kit directly to see the data whenever you want.

Either way, the data is there. The question is just who reads it and acts on it.

Caution! Site Kit needs setting up properly

Site Kit itself is free, but the setup is not trivial. Each of the four Google services has to be configured in the right order, with the right Google account, the right permissions, and the right verification steps. Get any of it wrong and you end up with a half-connected dashboard that shows misleading numbers, or worse, no numbers at all.

This is why Site Kit setup is a paid service rather than something I throw in for free. It is genuinely fiddly work, but once it is done correctly it pays for itself many times over in the insights it delivers.

You will also need a free Google account to use Site Kit. A standard Gmail address is enough, and there is nothing to pay.

Ready to sign up? Please see Sign up for Google Site Kit.