Site Kit: Google's New Plugin for WordPress

1) What is Google Site Kit?

Google Site Kit is a new plugin launched by Google (with over 1,000 downloads already within just a few hours) that lets us get information about how users find our website, how to improve it, and how to monetize it directly from the WordPress dashboard.

It's a new project launched at the end of October and beginning of November, and it appears to be the start of an integration process between tools like Search Console, Analytics, and WordPress, which would make these tools much easier to understand for the basic-to-intermediate user who doesn't have advanced SEO knowledge and doesn't visit these tools on a daily basis.

[caption id="attachment_5561" align="aligncenter" width="938"]

Example of the Site Kit tool Dashboard in WordPress.[/caption]

2) What is Site Kit used for?

Currently, Site Kit has 4 main modules:

• ›Search Console, which allows us to see performance statistics about which are the most important keywords sending us the most traffic, average CTR, number of impressions... and we can choose any time period we want for our analysis.
• ›Analytics, which will not only let us see the number of users per day, page views... but will also provide very useful information about the evolution of these metrics over time, whether there has been a particularly intense day of activity... which will help us make better decisions.
• ›Page Speed Insights, which will provide information about each page's performance in terms of speed, requests... and will show us a metric we can interpret to know whether we're doing a good job or, on the contrary, we need to dedicate more effort to WPO (Web Performance Optimization).
• ›AdSense, which will give us information about the advertising revenue the website is generating.

Although these are the only modules initially active, it's true that we can expand this selection with other options like Optimize or Tag Manager.

3) Advantages and Disadvantages of Site Kit

Now that you know the main features and functionalities of the plugin, you're surely wondering... is it really worth it? That's why we've compiled a series of advantages and disadvantages so you can make the decision with all the facts on the table.

Advantages:

• ›Easy installation
• ›Pleasant and intuitive design
• ›Very useful alert system
• ›Accessibility of the data

Disadvantages:

• ›Slightly increases web requests, reducing web performance.
• ›Asks for a lot of permissions, which is sensitive and requires careful review.
• ›Simple interface without many filtering options or data manipulation features.

4) Personal opinion

I tried this tool when it was still in beta by installing it manually and, honestly, it didn't quite convince me. However, after all the improvements the plugin has received, the truth is that it has changed a lot and both the features and the design look very promising, so for now we're going to give it a chance at SEO Alive.

Have you tried it yet? How were your first impressions?

We'd be delighted to hear your opinion and exchange experiences in the comments section.

5) References

• ›Official plugin website