Making Google Site Kit: A 7-Year Open Source Collaboration
In 2018, Google came to us with a big question: what would it take to bring essential tools like Analytics, Search Console, and AdSense directly inside WordPress, the CMS powering more than 40% of the web?
The answer became Google Site Kit: a secure, first-party plugin built natively for WordPress, offering website owners trusted access to vital Google’s services, without the friction of third-party setups or unclear integrations.
Over the past seven years, Site Kit has grown into one of the most widely adopted plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Today, it boasts more than 5 million active installs, and recently broke into the top 10 most popular WordPress plugins on the official directory. From the very beginning, we’ve been partnered with Google driving Site Kit, across engineering, design, QA, support, product strategy, and platform evolution.
For Google, Site Kit was about more than driving product adoption. It was about making the open web healthier, more accessible, and easier to grow on—for everyone from publishers and small business owners to nonprofit storytellers and independent creators. WordPress is a cornerstone of an open internet, and Site Kit represents a meaningful investment in supporting independent websites.
For our team, this wasn’t just about engineering features. It was a multi-year, multi-phase partnership that challenged us to scale thoughtfully, collaborate deeply, and help shape a product that continues to evolve alongside WordPress and the web itself, from front line customer support, to quality control, to user experience design.
Check out the newly published case study on our new Fueled website, tracing the evolution of this project. If you’re thinking about how to grow your platform by integrating with the web’s most popular CMS—or want a partner who can turn a vision into a growing digital product—let’s talk.
And if you’d like to learn more about Site Kit and will be at WordCamp Europe in Switzerland (June 5–7), we’d love to connect. You can find members of our team at the Google booth throughout the event: Oona Vaisanen, VP of Client Strategy, EMEA; Emily Clarke, Associate Director of Client Delivery; Simon Dowdles, Lead Web Engineer; Evan Mattson, Staff Engineer. Come say hello—we’d love to tell you about what’s next for Site Kit.