News

As of Site Kit version 1.150.0, we’re introducing new ways to engage with your visitors and make your site more sustainable – by connecting Reader Revenue Manager, you’ll be able to place calls to action for your readers to set up a subscription or do a one-off contribution. This new functionality will gradually roll out to all Site Kit users over the next several weeks.   

If you want to engage with your readers without necessarily asking them to contribute money, Site Kit already offers the ability to add non-monetary CTAs to your site, like surveys or newsletter sign-ups. Learn more about the different options to engage with your site visitors.

Connect Reader Revenue Manager and create a publication

If you’re based in a country where Reader Revenue Manager is available, you’ll be able to create a publication and select the type of call to action you want to place on your site – subscription, one-off contributions, surveys, newsletter sign-up, and more. Site Kit’s technical docs offer detailed step-by-step guidance on how to do the setup. 

Control where on your site the calls to action appear 

Once your publication is connected, Site Kit will help place the necessary code snippets on your site and you can select where the calls to action should appear – Site Kit offers granular controls at the content type and individual post level. 

If adding contributions or subscriptions to your site sounds like an interesting opportunity, check out the detailed implementation guide in our documentation. As always, if you have any questions, you can always reach us on our WordPress.org support forum.

As of Site Kit version 1.146.0, Sign in with Google is now available to all sites. As a site owner, this new feature allows you to offer your site visitors a simple, secure, and privacy preserving way for them to sign in and optionally register using a passwordless, token-based authentication method.

Sign in with Google has many benefits for site owners:

• Improved User Experience: Offering a familiar and trusted sign in method like Google can streamline the registration and login process, encouraging more users to engage with your site.
• Increased user acquisition and retention: Use cases across different industries have been published demonstrating the impact of using Sign in with Google on increased sign up and sign in conversion. Websites that use Sign in with Google have seen conversion rates more than double (2x) for both sign ins and sign ups.
• Increased Efficiency: Eliminating the need to manage passwords and user accounts simplifies site administration and frees up time for other tasks. Site owners can also login to their WordPress administrator dashboard using Sign in with Google, without having user registrations open. 
• Build Trust: Build user trust by offering a seamless & secure authentication experience. 

For site visitors, the advantages include:

• Convenience: Users can easily and safely create accounts or sign into websites without the hassle of usernames and passwords.
• Availability: Sign in with Google works on all devices and platforms, including iOS or Android, so they can enjoy a seamless sign-in experience anywhere.
• Security: Google’s advanced security measures provide protection against Google account compromise.
• Privacy: Only the minimum data necessary to facilitate sign in is shared with the site. 

If Sign in with Google sounds like a good fit for your website, just activate the service in Site Kit and give it a try! If you have any questions or comments, we’re always available to help via the Site Kit WordPress support forum.

We’ve heard from many Site Kit users that they’d like to share stats and insights from Site Kit’s dashboard with others on their team without having to give them administrator-level access to their site or share full access to the underlying Google services. 

In fact, this was one of the earliest feature requests we received after launching Site Kit – issue #6 has seen a lot of discussion and interesting comments! Thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion and shared feedback. We took everything to heart and invested a lot of time to design a solution that would be intuitive to use while also meeting our privacy and security standards.

Today, we’re happy to announce that issue #6 is officially closed 🥳

Today, we’re rolling out two new abilities for admins:

1. Share a view-only version of the Site Kit dashboard with other roles (e.g. editors, contributors, etc.)
2. Grant other administrators the ability to manage view-only access to the dashboard

Note that these new features will become available over multiple releases, so you may not see these changes yet. 

Give view-only access to others

As an administrator, you can easily share the Site Kit dashboard by clicking on the share icon in the top-right corner. In the modal, select which services you’d like to share with which WordPress roles. The next time your team logs in, the Site Kit dashboard will be available to them from the WP menu. They won’t need to sign in with a Google account to view the dashboard. If there are other administrators on the site, they can choose if they want to log in and set up Site Kit on their own, or view the shared dashboard. 

Administrators can choose which Google services they would like others to be able to view data for on the Site Kit dashboard. As an example, let’s say you’d like the editors on your team to be able to see the overall traffic and top search queries for the site, but not the overall AdSense income. You can give them view-only access to Search Console and Analytics only and skip AdSense.

Let other administrators manage who can view the dashboard 

In Site Kit, a module “owner” is the person who originally connected the module by signing in with their Google account. By default, that module owner is the only person who can share data for that module. However, If there’s more than one admin on the site and you’d like other admins to be able to share view-only access for your module to the Site Kit dashboard, you can do this as well from the share icon. These administrators will need to be signed in to their Google account in order to be able to manage access.  

Dashboard sharing is very powerful and flexible, so it’s definitely worth reading through our detailed guide to understand the nuances of how it works. And of course, if you have more questions, you can always find us on our WordPress.org support forum. 

Happy sharing!

In today’s release, we’re making it easier to get in touch with our support team directly from your dashboard and quickly resolve any issues you might have using Site Kit. 

Continue reading “Find help directly from your dashboard & meet the new Site Kit sidekicks”

In today’s release, we’re launching a completely revamped “All Traffic” section of Site Kit to make it easier for you to find out exactly how people discover and visit your site 🎉

Continue reading “All New All Traffic in Site Kit”

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics to help site owners and developers understand as accurately as possible how visitors experience their pages. For example, whether the most important elements of your pages are loading fast enough, or how long it takes before visitors can interact with your pages. 

Core Web Vitals will also be a key component in the assessment of page experience ranking factor in Google Search.

To make sure you have the most relevant info about how people experience your pages, we’re bringing Core Web Vitals metrics to Site Kit in our latest release 1.10.0  🎉

Continue reading “Understand how visitors experience your pages: Core Web Vitals now available in Site Kit”

We were alerted to a vulnerability in Site Kit which could allow users without administrator privileges on WordPress to verify ownership of a site they’re registered to in Search Console. As soon as we found out about this, we tracked down the root cause and released a security patch in version 1.8.0 on May 7, as well as additional security enhancements in version 1.8.1 on May 19.
If you’re using Site Kit version 1.8.0 or below, we strongly recommend you upgrade to 1.8.1 as soon as possible.
We’ve worked with the wordpress.org team to automatically update Site Kit for existing users to 1.8.1.

Continue reading “Security Vulnerability in Site Kit: upgrade now to 1.8.1”

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 enables you to setup and configure key Google services, get insights on how people find and use your site, learn how to improve, and easily monetize your content.

Continue reading “Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites”

Since we announced Site Kit at WordCamp US 2018, we’ve interviewed many of you who had expressed interest to be early testers and made lots of improvements based on your input. Thanks to everyone who participated and took time to share their impressions!

Continue reading “Site Kit is now available as a developer preview”

Managing a successful website can be complicated. Publishers and business owners should have easy access to the insights and capabilities that drive audience and revenue growth. That’s why we’re excited to announce Site Kit by Google, a free, open-source plugin bringing together insights from essential Google products for WordPress sites.

Continue reading “Introducing Site Kit by Google for WordPress”