Google site kit kills my Page speed insights score

Hi there @daninthepan,

Thanks for sharing details of the performance testing you’ve undergone, and sorry to hear you’re unhappy with your site performance at present.

When you choose to setup services such as AdSense or Google Analytics manually manually or using Site Kit, there will be additional https requests made between your site and these Google services. These can have a slight performance impact, with mant factors involved. Site Kit is primarily a wp-admin operated plugin that doesn’t make any additional such requests on the front end of your site.

We also have further information on this on the plugin website if you’d like to take a look.

If you are looking to give Site Kit a try once more going forward feel free to ask me any questions on the above and I’d be happy to assist further.

Hi, i’m thinking the same as @daninthepan ! Tryied to optimize my mobile lightouse score since 2 weeks, and after removing Google Site Kit (which with is latest version completly not working, so i needed to replace manually the tracking code since i haven’t see any live data from Analytics since the update), my mobile score passed from 35 to 65 without any frontend change! Google wtf ?!

Hi @aerolythe,

Thanks for sharing your experience. In cases where users add services to their site, such as Analytics or AdSense, there may be no visual changes to a users front end – apart from ads if applicable. There will however be additional https requests made to connect a users site with these services. These are not Site Kit requests, they are service level requests

If you perform similar checks on your site when adding such services manually, independently of using Site Kit you may encounter similar results. Site Kit facilities the addition of these services for WordPress users.

As mentioned above you can find out more on this by visiting the related documentation on the plugin website:
https://sitekit.withgoogle.com/documentation/using-site-kit/front-end/

I don’t mean to be rude James but what you are saying is, it’s not the package (google site kit) it’s the contents (google analytics, google adsense etc)? So…
If you eat a bag of potato chips that kills you don’t be angry with the packet.
Thanks, sound advice James.
??

Thanks for the follow up @daninthepan, and not rude whatsoever, feedback taken with your excellent analogy!

In addition to adding any Google services you may wish to consider any features added via Google Tag Manager, which could include Facebook pixel or third party Analytics snippets. But do reach out if you want us to take a look at your site or if you have any further queries.

Thanks James, appreciate the response. Would really appreciate if you could look at the site (no expectation though). If you could get in to WP, run a page speed insight test without site kit then run a page speed insight test with google site kit and let me know anything I could do, it would be appreciated.
(Fully appreciate this is probably way outside your responsibility so no worries if you can’t).

No problem whatsoever, that’s what we’re here in the support forums to do! I’ve just performed an analysis now on a clean site, using Tastewp. See below examples:

1. Using Site Kit to insert the various Google property snippets: Recording | 87 performance score
2. Manually inserting the various Google property snippets: Recording | 83 performance score

Note that while the performance score is higher when Site Kit is used, there are various factors when it comes to performance score, in general the scores should be similar or close in numbers. In your case if you’re performing analysis you may also wish to exclude the Site Kit admin toolbar (Site Kit > Settings > Admin Settings > Display relevant page stats in the Admin bar), depending on what tool you’re using to perform a lighthouse test (ie. From the Chrome browser dev tools). Using the Site Kit admin toolbar and performing a test with this can impact your results.

Let me know if you have any questions with the above.

As we didn’t receive a response I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to encounter issues, or reopen this topic and we’d be happy to assist.