google webmaster tools

A fast web experience has long been an important user experience factor that we have promoted and advocated for. To help site owners on this quest we showed a preview of the Speed report in Search Console at Google I/O 2019. Since then, we’ve been iterating on all the great feedback from the beta testers and, starting today, are excited to begin public rollout!

Discovering potential user experience problems can be hard, especially on sites with many pages. To help site owners, the Speed report automatically assigns groups of similar URLs into “Fast”, “Moderate”, and “Slow” buckets. The data is based on the Chrome User Experience Report, which provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.

Image: Speed report overview

The report classifies URLs by speed and the issue that causes any slowdowns. Drill down on a specific issue to see examples of slow URLs to help you prioritize performance improvements for them. To get a better sense of what type of optimization can be performed for a specific URL, the report links to the Page Speed Insight tool, which provides information on specific optimization opportunities.

You should use this report both for monitoring your performance over time and for tracking fixes you made to your website. If you fix an issue, use the report to track whether users experienced a performance improvement when browsing the fixed version of your website.

To help you understand how your site is performing, you can also see what types of URLs are doing better by checking the moderate and fast buckets.

Image: URLs in the fast bucket

This new report is classified as “experimental” as we plan to continue to iterate and improve the metrics and recommendations for site owners. We will monitor feedback submitted directly through the report and in the user forum to ensure that it is useful and helpful, so please let us know how we are doing.

Posted By Sion Schori & Amir Rachum, Software Engineers

Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites

Thursday, October 31, 2019

Today, we’re announcing that Site Kit is available for everyone to install from the WordPress plugin directory. Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin — it gives you insights on how people find and use your site, how to improve and monetize your content, with data from multiple Google tools. Learn more about Site Kit on the official Site Kit website.

Who is Site Kit for?

Site Kit makes it easy for WordPress site owners to understand how their site is doing and what to do next. As a WordPress site owner, Site Kit offers you:

  • Easy to verify site ownership through Search Console — no need to paste a code snippet on your site to prove you’re an owner.
  • Convenient and easy access to relevant stats directly in your WordPress dashboard. We save you time — see the key information right when you sign in.
  • Cross-product insights — Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense — are combined into a single, intuitive dashboard. We help you make informed decisions, quickly.
  • No source code editing. This is the easiest way to install and manage Google products on your site in just a few clicks.

If you are a developer or an agency working on WordPress sites for clients, Site Kit can make your life easier:

  • You’ll get aggregated insights from Google products, 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 — 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 make sure only the relevant people can see stats from Google products.

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.

  • Easy connection to official Google tools. Your customers don’t have to edit the source code to set up Google tools.
  • Added value for your platform. Your customers get important information about how their site is performing right in your own dashboard.
  • Flexible UI. You can pull stats from the plugin dashboard and display stats natively in your platform’s UI.

Site Kit’s main dashboard helps you see the most important info about how your site is doing at a glance: how people are finding your site (traffic sources), your most popular pages, and what people search for to find your site. For more, check out the Find your way around Site Kit guide in our docs.

Get started with Site Kit

To get started, install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Here are some recommendations on how you can make the most of Site Kit:

  • Review the main dashboard on a weekly basis and check for any significant changes in how people are finding your site. Are people finding your site from a new place?
  • Keep track of how your recent posts are doing by checking the individual page reports.
  • Compare the top performing pages and how people found them. Is a particular topic or product attracting more visitors from social channels?
  • Set up new Google services to get more interesting insights — for example, if you enable PageSpeed Insights and Analytics, you’ll be able to see whether page load time affects bounce rate.

If you are attending WordCamp US in Saint Louis, stop by to see a demo of Site Kit and talk to the team. We’re also happy to answer your questions in the Site Kit support forum.

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