The Ultimate Guide to Conducting an Audit of Your Ecommerce Website

Auditing is a crucial management aspect for ecommerce stores that desire to stay abreast of the market and sustain a high revenue level. By conducting regular audits, you can avoid significant issues, ensure the optimal performance of your website under all conditions, and gain valuable insights for further success.

We’ve compiled this guide to provide you with a clear idea of the ecommerce auditing process and help determine if your online store requires it.

6 Reasons Why You Need an Ecommerce Website Audit 

Performing an ecommerce audit implies a thorough examination and evaluation of the website’s diverse features in order to identify weak points, make improvements, and mitigate potential risks.

Let’s explore in detail how a website audit can benefit your commercial business in today’s highly competitive digital market.

1. Identify and fix issues

Slow page loading, navigation difficulties, broken links, poor mobile responsiveness, and many other issues can hinder the performance of your online store and ultimately lead to lost sales opportunities. A comprehensive ecommerce site audit allows you to uncover any technical or usability problems and address them promptly. This way, you can avoid malfunctions and downtime of your digital store, retaining customers and saving the brand’s reputation.

2. Boost performance and speed

Another crucial reason for conducting an ecommerce audit is the necessity to optimize the website’s overall efficiency. Different factors, for example, large files, excessive plugins and scripts, server issues, or inefficient code, contribute to slow page loading and poor performance. Professional auditors can reveal such factors by examining server configuration, caching mechanisms, code structure, and other aspects. 

A faster and smoother website operation not only increases user satisfaction, but also positively impacts search engine rankings, ultimately driving more organic traffic and sales.

3. Improve user experience and accessibility

Delivering a seamless and enjoyable user experience is vital for the success of any ecommerce store. An audit is an efficient tool that provides insights into how users interact with your website and the usability issues they may encounter.

For example, mobile responsiveness is a critical aspect to consider. Given the increasing number of customers opting for mobile shopping, it is essential that your website displays properly and functions well on different screen sizes. Specialists check whether all elements resize correctly and whether touch targets are not too small on mobile devices. This guarantees that your online store is accessible to a wider audience.

A Storyblok survey reveals that 60% of consumers abandon purchases due to poor website user experience. Ecommerce companies lose an average of 5 purchases per consumer annually, with 8% of consumers abandoning over 10 purchases.

4. Increase conversion rates and reduce cart abandonment

An ecommerce platform audit can pinpoint areas where you may be losing potential conversions. These are often related to problems with site navigation, shopping cart functionality, checkout processes, and customer service.For instance, if some items are located in the wrong product category or the checkout is too complicated and time-consuming, potential customers become frustrated. In case they don’t find proper support, they will definitely abandon their shopping carts. Auditors can help you reveal such problematic areas, fix them, and thus boost conversions.

5. Ensure data security and compliance

No need to say that security is of principal importance for ecommerce platforms, as they work with personal data and payment details. Regular audits provide a thorough assessment of the existing security measures and give reports on vulnerabilities and potential risks, enabling you to be proactive.

6. Optimize content and product descriptions

By analyzing the existing content on your website, auditors identify gaps or inconsistencies that may negatively impact user experience. Particularly, they highlight outdated information, irrelevant details, or missing product characteristics. This allows you to make product descriptions and other content items more accurate, engaging, and persuasive, thereby increasing audience loyalty.

What Does an Ecommerce Site Audit Include?

Below, we provide a detailed overview of activities comprising the ecommerce site audit. Your online shop may need only one or several types of analysis, or require an end-to-end process. To learn which audit services you need, feel free to contact the SaM Solutions team.

Architecture audit

The architecture of a software solution serves as its technological foundation, reflecting major requirements and constraints. A well-designed architecture is key to success for your project, as it enables accurate resource allocation, risk mitigation, and alignment with business objectives.

Auditing the architecture of your ecommerce software system includes a thorough examination of its overall efficiency and developing recommendations for improvement. This can be an initial step for further comprehensive assessment, because the findings obtained from the architecture audit provide valuable insights for conducting technical, security and other types of audits.

Technical audit

This type of audit aims at assessing various technical aspects of your website to ensure its optimal functionality and seamless user experience. It involves evaluations of:

• Server configuration. Experts review resource allocation, server modules, network settings, and capacity planning to make sure that the server is appropriately configured to meet operational demands efficiently.
• Hosting performance. Focuses on the compliance of your website’s hosting environment with the required standards. In particular, specialists examine uptime, server response time, bandwidth capacity, and scalability, which are key factors for reliable website functioning.
• Website speed. Page loading speed depends on the size, format, and compression of files, image and script optimization, server response time, caching, network latency, and other aspects. A technical audit identifies any speed bottlenecks, enabling you to boost the store’s efficiency.
• Caching mechanisms. Auditors also check if the server-side and client-side caching are properly implemented, configured, and utilized to reduce server load and minimize data transfer.
• Responsiveness. One more task of a technical audit is to assess the adaptability of your ecommerce store across devices with different screen sizes. It involves testing the website’s layout, design, and functionality on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. 

Data security and compliance audit

Weak password protocols, insecure payment gateways, and other vulnerable areas pose a threat to customer data and your store’s reputation. A crucial goal of auditing is to inspect whether the current security measures are sufficient to protect the server against unauthorized access, data breaches, and malicious activities. 

Namely, auditors examine:

• Access control. Access control mechanisms are thoroughly tested for vulnerabilities and weaknesses during the audit. Experts assess the implementation of robust password policies, including complexity and expiration requirements. They also evaluate session management to prevent hijacking or fixation attacks, and check the effectiveness of account lockout mechanisms against brute-force attacks. This ensures that only authorized individuals or roles can access sensitive information and perform specific actions.
• SSL encryption. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a cryptographic protocol that ensures safe data transmission. It establishes a secure connection between a web browser and a server, rendering transmitted data unreadable to unauthorized parties. During the audit, experts assess the proper implementation of SSL encryption on your website and verify the validity and expiration of the SSL certificate.
• Firewall configurations. A firewall serves as a critical security component for protecting network systems. Auditors assess its ability to monitor and control incoming and outgoing traffic, examine rules that define allowed and blocked traffic types, and also check whether the firewall is configured to log and alert suspicious activities. Additionally, they can review integration with other security systems to ensure comprehensive defense against potential attacks.
• Payment gateways. These intermediary services enable secure online transactions between customers and merchants. Encryption of customer payment information is a key focus area for auditors. They check whether the gateway uses strong encryption algorithms to guarantee that even if an unauthorized party intercepts sensitive data, like credit card details, they cannot decipher or use it.
• Backup and disaster recovery procedures. These are essential for maintaining business continuity and mitigating system failures. The goal of an audit is to assess the frequency of backups, ensuring that they occur at appropriate intervals to minimize the risk of data loss. Experts also check if the copied data is stored in locations that are protected from physical damage or unauthorized access. Another point is to examine if the website has a documented recovery plan, defining the procedures for restoring data from backups, rebuilding the website infrastructure, and resuming normal operations.
• Compliance with data protection regulations. Auditors verify if the ecommerce website adheres to relevant data protection regulations such as GDPR in the EU. This includes evaluating privacy notices, consent mechanisms, and personal data processing practices.

Functionality audit

A functionality audit comprehensively evaluates critical features of an ecommerce website to assess their effectiveness and usability.

Specialists pay particular attention to:

• The product search functionality, analyzing its speed and result accuracy according to user queries. 
• Filtering options, assessing their flexibility, intuitiveness, and ability to refine search results based on specific criteria such as price, brand, or product attributes. 
• The checkout process, testing the user journey from adding items to the cart to completing the purchase. It’s crucial to check the clarity of instructions, whether there are multiple payment options, and clear information about shipping costs and delivery timelines. 
• Payment gateways, verifying that they comply with industry standards and can securely transmit and store sensitive banking details.  
• Order management system, evaluating whether the website provides clear order confirmation messages, automated email notifications for order updates, and a user-friendly interface for customers to track the delivery. 
• Inventory tracking system, ensuring that it accurately reflects the availability of products, avoids overselling, and updates in real-time to prevent any discrepancies between displayed stock and actual availability.

On-page SEO audit

Identifying SEO-related issues is also part of an ecommerce website audit. Poor meta tags, broken links, or an unclear site structure negatively impact the organic visibility of your online shop in search engine results. That’s why specialists thoroughly analyze the following parameters:

• Keyword optimization — relevant keywords should be strategically incorporated into the text content, including headings, meta tags, titles and descriptions, and image alt tags throughout the website.
• URL structure — each page should have a concise and descriptive URL, containing subject-matter keywords. 
• Internal linking — pages within your website should be linked together to ensure a logical and effective navigation structure, which allows customers to easily access needed information. Additionally, using relevant anchor text to link pages enhances search engine discovery, crawling, indexing, and ranking of your content.
• Sitemap — a file that provides a hierarchical list of all the pages on your website should be well-structured and include important metadata about each page. A proper sitemap is crucial for the visibility of pages in search engine results since it serves as a roadmap for crawlers, helping them understand the content organization.  
• Robots.txt — a file that should contain accurate information about which parts of the site are accessible to search engine crawlers. This is particularly useful for excluding sensitive or private areas, such as customer account pages, checkout processes, or administrative sections that don’t need to be indexed.
• Broken links — ideally, there should be no hyperlinks on your site that lead to non-existent or inaccessible webpages. Such links typically result in a 404 error message and have negative implications both for user experience and SEO. When visitors encounter broken links, it frustrates them and creates a poor perception of the website’s reliability and professionalism, leading to increased bounce rates and lost conversions. From an SEO perspective, broken links disrupt the crawling process, preventing indexing of linked pages, which in turn harms visibility, rankings, overall website authority, and link equity.

User experience audit

A user experience (UX) audit for an ecommerce website involves a detailed analysis of various elements to evaluate customer satisfaction. 

The main indicator of your online store’s success is that visitors can quickly find what they need without confusion. That’s why specialists foremost analyze website navigation for intuitiveness and ease of use, considering the menu placement, labels, breadcrumbs, and category/subcategory structure. 

Another important aspect of the UX audit is evaluating website accessibility. This includes assessing factors such as color contrast, font size, and the presence of alternative text for images to ensure that all users, including those with disabilities, can easily access and navigate the online store. Additionally, auditors check if the website adapts to various screen sizes, loads quickly, and maintains functionality on mobile devices.

Clarity of calls-to-action (CTAs) is also examined to ensure that buttons and links are clearly labeled and visually distinct, guiding users toward desired actions such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.

Finally, the overall user journey is analyzed to see how easily customers can complete tasks and achieve goals on the website. Specialists analyze the flow step by step, from landing on the homepage to browsing products, adding items to the cart, and completing the checkout process. Their goal is to ensure there are no complicated forms, unclear instructions, or other potential obstacles to finishing the journey.

Content audit

This type of audit gives you a thorough review of the quality, relevance, and consistency of various types of content on your site. Here, experts review:

• Product descriptions for tone, style, and formatting consistency.
• Visual items (images and videos) for the ability to draw attention. 
• Pricing information and promotional content for accuracy and relevance.
• Blog posts for readability and the value they bring to the target audience.  

Conversion tracking and analytics

Auditors analyze website KPIs to discover items that resonate with the audience, driving conversions, as well as areas that need improvement. Unsatisfactory performance metrics can stem from various reasons, for example:

• The layout, design, and content of the landing pages are not engaging and persuasive, so they don’t stimulate a seamless transition from the initial click to further website exploration.
• Product pages don’t provide comprehensive and compelling information, so visitors are not encouraged to make a purchase.
• The checkout process comprises too many steps, a form to fill out is too complicated, or there is no clear shipping information. Such obstacles often lead to high shopping cart abandonment rates.
• The wrong placement of CTAs results in poor visibility and low click-through rates. 

By utilizing insights gained, you can rework marketing strategies, make content enhancements, and ultimately optimize the conversion funnel.

Competitor analysis

It’s always beneficial to look at the competitive landscape and learn from others’ successes and failures. The analysis of competitors’ websites is an essential component of an ecommerce audit. By understanding what other companies are doing well, you can open up new opportunities to enhance your online store and differentiate it in the market.

Competitor analysis allows you to benchmark performance against industry rivals and identify best practices they use in terms of design, layout, user experience, product offerings, pricing strategies, and marketing tactics. Adopt the most valuable and applicable ideas, set realistic goals, and strive for better results.

Perform an Ecommerce Website Audit with SaM Solutions

As a mature ecommerce development services provider, SaM Solutions can help you optimize your online presence and skyrocket your conversions. With our vast experience working with the leading ecommerce platforms, including SAP Customer Experience (previously SAP Hybris), Sitecore XC and OrderCloud, as well as Adobe Commerce (previously Magento), we have the tools and knowledge to transform your digital storefront into a sales powerhouse.

At SaM Solutions, we specialize in delivering a wide range of ecommerce solutions tailored to your specific needs. Whether you’re focused on B2B, B2C, C2C marketplaces, multi-vendor platforms, CPQ solutions, or self-service portals, our team is equipped to handle it all. 

One of our key offerings is a comprehensive technical audit. Our experienced specialists employ cutting-edge tools, such as SonarQube, to conduct a thorough evaluation of your website. We delve into the intricacies of your platform, identifying any performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, or usability issues that may be hindering your growth. With our audit report in hand, you’ll have a clear roadmap for optimization and improvement.

We also provide on-page SEO audits to supercharge your website’s visibility. If you’re looking to increase organic traffic and improve your search engine rankings, our SEO experts can analyze your website’s structure, content, and keyword optimization. As soon as we understand the unique challenges and requirements of your business, we’ll ensure that your ecommerce ecosystem is designed to drive success.