If you have an online store, you know that e-commerce management is a fundamental part of a successful business. Tracking sales is essential and so is ensuring your performance in search results!
You also need to know if your store is safe and easy to use. And how it compares to the competition.
A well-done audit can reveal valuable insights into SEO performance and other factors that affect the user experience (UX). It’s also an opportunity to determine what you do well and what you could do better.
What is an e-commerce audit?
A website audit analyzes the performance, functionality and content of your website. It’s like a health check on your blog, website or online store.
Therefore, if you run an online store, you will analyze factors such as:
- Page loading speed;
- Optimization for mobile devices;
- Organic classifications;
- Use of keywords;
- Quality of content;
- Internal linkage;
- Site navigation;
- Accessibility;
- Security.
These aspects can have an impact on your search engine rankings and user experience. Analyzing them helps you identify possible problems and opportunities for improvement.
Why should you audit your e-commerce?
An audit can uncover possible vulnerabilities, errors and performance problems. It can also reveal opportunities to optimize your content, pages and overall site structure for greater visibility in search results.
These insights can help you improve your e-commerce management and provide a better user experience, which helps increase sales.
Other potential benefits include:
- Detect potential problems early: detect technical problems before they get worse. For example, you may realize that a specific plug-in or code is slowing down your site and causing visitors to leave before buying anything.
- Optimize your conversion rates: in a 2022 survey, 37% of shoppers said they would leave an e-commerce site that was difficult to navigate or had a poor layout. Another 33% would do the same if a site took too long to load.
Regular audits allow you to identify and correct these problems to keep visitors on your site for longer. This can result in a better user experience and increased sales.
- Uncover growth opportunities: an e-commerce audit can reveal your best-performing pages and user behavior trends and patterns. Use these insights to create better content and personalize the customer experience.
- Avoiding data breaches: the best SEO auditing tools can uncover security problems that can lead to data breaches. These vulnerabilities can include outdated plug-ins, malicious code, weak passwords and old security protocols.
Just as your car needs regular check-ups, your website requires ongoing maintenance. From broken links to unsecured pages, many things can go wrong.
You can use the following checklist to work on a site audit.
Read also: Marketing for e-commerces: check out 6 strategies that work
5 key points for an online store audit
A comprehensive audit is not limited to website performance, security and SEO. It also takes into account factors such as UX and accessibility, which can directly impact sales.
For example, failure to comply with accessibility standards can negatively affect the customer experience and result in hefty fines. Over the years, several consumers have sued Netflix, Amazon, DoorDash and other major brands for being inaccessible to users with disabilities.
The same happened with Nike. Consumers accused it of using empty text links and not using alternative text on its website. These errors made its content inaccessible to screen readers.
This e-commerce audit checklist covers your five main focus areas.
Site performance
Website performance refers to page loading speed and other factors that affect the functionality of a website.
The shorter the loading time, the faster the web page will load. This means that users will wait less time to see the content they want, which can improve their experience. And a better UX can contribute to higher rankings in search engines.
A 0.1 second improvement in site speed can increase conversions and cause retail consumers to spend around 10% more. It can also increase session duration, engagement rates and page views.
User experience (UX)
User experience is basically how people feel when they interact with a website, product or service.
For example, a Baymard Institute survey of 1,012 US consumers in 2024 analyzed the most common reasons for cart abandonment. Of those interviewed, 17% said that they had abandoned their shopping carts in the last three months because the website had errors or crashed.
Another 22% of respondents said that they left without buying because the checkout process was too long or complicated.
Make sure your website offers a perfect shopping experience. Otherwise, you could lose potential customers and sales.
UX and SEO go hand in hand. Optimizing your pages for search engines can improve the user experience. But first, you should audit your site to identify usability problems and other points that affect the customer journey.
Technical SEO and On-Page SEO
Technical SEO improves the structure and code of your site to help increase its visibility in search results.
On-page SEO involves optimizing internal links and other elements on the page.
A technical on-page SEO audit can help you identify broken external links, missing alternative attributes, pages with low word counts and much more. These problems can affect your search engine rankings and conversion rates if left unresolved.
For example, broken links – whether internal or external – can have a negative impact on UX. These hyperlinks point to pages that no longer exist.
When users encounter broken links, the server returns a 4xx status code, such as a 404 error.
Visitors cannot access the content they are looking for. This can lead to frustration, high bounce rates and lost sales.
Read also: SEO for e-commerce: strategies to sell more
Accessibility
Web accessibility involves making your site usable by everyone, including consumers with disabilities.
These people may be potential customers. But you risk losing sales and revenue if they can’t access your web pages, blog posts and product descriptions. Your reputation could also be damaged.
A 2024 study of one million home pages detected 56,791,260 accessibility errors, ranging from missing alternative text to empty buttons.
Here’s what the researchers found:
- 37.9% skipped title levels (for example, jumping from H2 to H4);
- 13.2% used ambiguous anchor text (the clickable text in a link);
- 81% of home pages had low-contrast text;
- 48.6% had no form entry labels;
- 54.5% had no alternative text to the image;
- 28.2% had empty buttons;
- 44.6% had empty links.
Image alternative text, for example, describes the content of an image for screen readers.
Your product images may not be accessible to visually impaired users if they don’t have alternative text. This can result in higher bounce rates, lost revenue and dissatisfied customers.
Security
Web security helps protect your site from cyber attacks.
The Baymard Institute reports that 25% of the 1,012 online shoppers surveyed in 2024 abandoned their carts in the last three months.
This is because they felt uncomfortable sharing their credit card information with the supplier.
Cart abandonment and lost sales are only part of the problem. A poorly protected website is also vulnerable to data breaches and other cyber threats that can..:
- They result in legal action and heavy fines;
- Affect your SEO and marketing efforts;
- Compromising customer data;
- Lead to loss of revenue and bankruptcy;
- Corrode customer trust;
- Damage your reputation.
An IBM report from 2023 states that data breaches cost companies with fewer than 500 employees an average of $3.31 million. It’s not news that many small business owners never recover from a cyber attack.
Conclusion
Efficient e-commerce management is crucial to the success of any online store. Carrying out a complete audit of your site not only reveals points for improvement, but also prevents problems that could negatively impact the user experience and, consequently, your sales.
A thorough e-commerce audit analyzes various factors, such as site performance, SEO, accessibility and security. Identifying and correcting problems in these aspects can optimize your conversion rates, improve the user experience and increase visibility in search engines.
In addition, regular audits help detect security vulnerabilities, preventing data breaches that could compromise customer confidence and result in significant financial losses.
Therefore, investing in periodic audits not only keeps your e-commerce healthy, but also provides a more satisfying shopping experience for your customers, boosting your sales and ensuring sustainable growth for your online business. Apply everything you’ve learned and we’ll see you in the next article! 😉
