Slower site and more bot traffic

Sorry to hear of your review @bluebrad. We do take all reviews seriously, and I’d be happy to respond or assist with any queries you have. See below some responses:

So it seems like when I’ve added this to my websites, first, it makes the website slower, and second, I seem to get a lot more bot traffic, and that was not intended.

Site Kit alone doesn’t have an performance impact on the front end after it’s installed with Search Console along. If you decide to activate Google Analytics, AdSense, Tag Manager etc, there will always be a trade off with performance as there are additional network requests made and JavaScript executed. This is the same with or without Site Kit.

Also, the bot traffic does not come from Google; it seems that a lot of it comes from elsewhere.

This is indeed unusual. If you wish to share your site URL or preferably your Site Health information for one of these sites I’d be happy to check and ensure Site Kit is set up as expected, which reviewing potential causes for additional analytics or advertising causes of additional bot traffic. I suspect they are non-Google initiated bot traffic, and more from a third party plugin or service. Hopefully we can determine the cause with a little troubleshooting.

The main thing I need to track is how many times people click a certain link on the webpage, where they leave the website, and where they land on the website from. Tracking sales is hard because you’d have to know your customer base and build rapport based on their orders. Google does help with that, but it does not fully guarantee or provide complete access to the system. Based on that, it seems that paying for any service from Google for analytics purposes only works if you fully integrate with Google’s ecosystem. The problem with that is it reveals customer data to Google data that your customers often don’t realize is being shared.

I understand, this would be important for any eCommerce owner. Indeed you’re correct that tracking sales is hard, but Site Kit, nor Google Analytics collect product/sales meta data by default. Site Kit, with Google Analytics connected within the plugin, does have an Enhanced Conversion Tracking feature that can be used to capture additional data if that’s what you wish, including WooCommerce data, but without that it doesn’t collect such data. You can use third party plugins for additional tracking that can be displayed within your WordPress dashboard, including specific WooCommerce Google Analytics plugins for example.

Do let me know if you have any questions with the above. In particular please do share an example site URL and I’d be happy to review for any potential issues. Thank you.

Appreciate the update @bluebrad, however, my suggestion was to consider the source of any performance impact. Yes there may can be a performance trade off when adding Google services to your site, although this is the same as the performance trade off when adding Google services without Site Kit. There are no network requests or JavaScript library calls made to any Site Kit resources, but there are to Google Analytics, AdSense and so on if a user decides to connect these services in Site Kit.

In reference to cross site traffic, we are bringing a feature to Site Kit whereby the Google Analytics scrip can be hosted locally. You’ll find more on that here.

Regarding bot traffic, sorry to hear of that, but it does sound like you’re dealing with less which is good. I’m aware Site Kit may not be for you at this time, but if you do decide to give it a try going forward, feel free to ask any questions. Best of luck regardless.