Use ‘Google Site Kit’ to easily setup Analytics, Search Console & Pagespeed Insights

See how Google’s free Site Kit plugin can easily set up tracking and reporting for your WordPress website.

Seeing how people find and use our sites is essential to improve our traffic and conversion rates. Google offer a range of free services to help with this including Google Analytics, Search Console and Pagespeed Insights.

Setting up Google Services in WordPress

There are various WordPress plugins that help install your Google Analytics tracking code and also provide a handy summary of key traffic statistics inside your WordPress dashboard. These are often freemium and constantly pester you to UPGRADE TO PRO! or install other plugins however, which gets tiresome.

Google Site Kit

Google have recently entered this market with their Site Kit plugin for WodPress. The plugin allows you to connect your Google services to your WordPress site with the minimum of fuss and no freemium adverts or upsells.

Installing the Site Kit plugin is easy from within WordPress as it’s hosted on the WordPress plugin repository. Once it’s installed and activated, a wizard takes you through connecting your Google services to the plugin.

Google Services supported by Site Kit

Google Analytics shows you your user numbers, session length and bounce rate down to a daily level.

Google Search Console (previously ‘Webmaster Tools’) shows your average position in their search engine results pages, impressions and clicks to your site.

Google Pagespeed Insights grades your website a percentage with scores for mobile and desktop visitors. These speed scores and the points they test your site for can show you where to improve your website speed. Google takes speed into account when deciding how to rank your site against others.

Summary

Google’s services can help us understand how people find our site and ensure search engines can pick up and rank our site pages. Google’s free Site Kit plugin makes this easy to achieve in your WordPress dashboard without installing annoying ‘freemium’ plugins.