Search engine giant Google has released a new plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for website owners like us to view consolidated data from across all Google’s services that we use for our website (Search Console, Analytics, etc) in a neat and centralized dashboard on our WordPress site.
This data is directly collected from each of the services you use and displayed in a human-understandable form (graphs, pie charts, and lists). At the time of writing this article, Google Site Kit allows you to connect your WordPress site with Google Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense, Optimize, and Tag Manager. It might roll out support for other services in the future.
Table of Contents
What is Google Site Kit
Google Site Kit is a neat little WordPress plugin from Google that helps you discover how people are finding your site, how your website is performing, areas of improvement, and more by integrating your site with the various services it offers for webmasters and publishers.
Search Console, Analytics, and AdSense are some of the services that are used by website owners and publishers to track their performance and monetize their content for a long time. And with Google making it official with the Site Kit plugin, it shows how serious they are about WordPress users.
Once you set up Site Kit on your website, you needn’t log in to each of these services separately every time to monitor the data. You can just log in to your WordPress site and view the data from the Google Site Kit dashboard widget or from its own dashboard page within WordPress. That is how easy it is.
Google Site Kit Features
- Google Search Console – Understand how your website performs on Google Search
- Google Analytics – Explore how people discover your website and what they do
- Google AdSense – Monetize your site and keep track of your earnings
- Google PageSpeed Insights – Monitor your web performance
- Google Optimize – Create free A/B tests and make data-driven decisions
- Google Tag Manager – Add and manage tags on your website without touching your WordPress files
How to install and set up Google Site Kit on your site
Now that you know what Site Kit is and what are some of the features it offers for site owners, agencies and publishers, let’s see how to configure Google Site Kit on WordPress.
Total Time: 30 minutes
Install and activate Google Site Kit
Install and activate the Site Kit by Google from your WordPress dashboard.
Start configuring Google Site Kit
Once you have activated the plugin, click on the Start Setup button from the Site Kit activation notice on your dashboard.
Verify site ownership
You will now be greeted with the Google Site Kit welcome screen listing out the steps required to connect your WordPress site with Google Site Kit. Click on the Sign in with Google button to start your site ownership verification process.
Choose your Google account
If you are logged in to more than one Google account, you will be asked to choose the desired Google account with which you would like to associate your website.
Grant Site Kit permissions
Site Kit will now request two permissions to ‘view and manage Search Console data for your verified sites’ and ‘manage the list of sites and domains you control’ respectively. Click on the Allow button for both the permissions.
Confirm your choices
You will now be asked to confirm your choices and allow Google to share your information with Site Kit. Once you click on the Allow button, you will become the verified owner of your domain name. 
Allow access to Google account data
You will now be returned to the Google Site Kit welcome screen where you have to click the Allow button again under Step 2 to allow your site to display metrics on the Site Kit dashboard.
Set up Search Console
You will now have to add your site to Search Console. Note that if you had previously added your website to Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools), there are no extra steps for you to take other than clicking the Add site button. If not, just follow the on-screen instructions to add it manually. 
Complete basic Site Kit setup
You have now successfully configured the basic steps required for configuring Google Site Kit on your site. That is, integrating it with Search Console and your WordPress site. Click on the Go to my Dashboard button to be taken to the Site Kit dashboard.
Connect more services to Site Kit
From the Site Kit dashboard, you can get an overview of your site and connect other Google services like AdSense, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights. Now, click on the Connect Service link under Analytics to connect Site Kit with Google Analytics and display the analytics data on your Site Kit dashboard.
Connect Site Kit with Google Analytics
Grant Site Kit all the four permissions it requires to function properly and confirm your choices by clicking on the Allow button.
Choose Google Analytics account and property
If you had previously created a Google Analytics property for your website, you can use it here by choosing the correct Google Analytics account and property. If not, Site Kit can help add a new tag for you.
Connect PageSpeed Insights and AdSense
You have now successfully integrated Google Analytics with Site Kit on your WordPress site. It’s time for you to connect PageSpeed Insights and AdSense by clicking on the Connect Service links under each of them to integrate it with Site Kit. With that, you have fully set up the Google Site Kit plugin on your WordPress site.
I’m not covering them here as it is somewhat similar to the above steps and PageSpeed Insights doesn’t need any new permissions and it will get connected automatically while AdSense requires a few extra steps to start working.
View Site Kit dashboard
Click on the Site Kit option from your WordPress menu to open the Site Kit dashboard. From here, you can view the data from all active Google services in an easy to understand format – like traffic sources, the total number of impressions, clicks and visitors, popular pages, top search queries, and site speed.
You can also view data from each of these services separately by clicking on the respective service from the Site Kit menu.
View Site Kit Settings
You can view your connected services and connect more services like Google Optimize and Tag Manager from the Google Site Kit Settings page. Or, if the need may arise, you can also reset Site Kit and start over under the Admin Settings tab.
Disconnect Site Kit from Google
If you no longer wish to use Site Kit on your site, you can easily disconnect Site Kit integration from Google and uninstall it.
Conclusion
Now that wasn’t hard, was it? Let us know whether you found this Google Site Kit set up guide helpful and what your views are on the plugin in the comments section below.
I setup Google Site Kit, very nice… but why is each WP admin asked to setup Google Site Kit when they log in?
I would think once it is setup, it’s done for anyone with Administrator access, no?
Hello Will, thanks for stopping by. I wish I could help you with that but I don’t own any sites with multiple users/administrators. So, I couldn’t test it from my end. Maybe you can try asking it in the support forum so that you can get help directly from the developers.
Cheers.