E-commerce Audit Checklist: 8 Essential Steps for Online Store Success
An e-commerce store is like a physical store in more ways than one. If a physical store has empty shelves, unclear prices, and no one to help, customers will leave as quickly as they came. The same happens when your e-commerce store is not optimised for success.
Potential customers won’t stick around if your online store isn’t fast, secure, and user-friendly. According to research, 70% of consumers[1] say they are less likely to make a purchase if a website is slow. That’s why a detailed e-commerce audit is a must! Regularly reviewing and optimising your online store can boost conversions and sales.
This checklist will guide you through the steps to audit your store and set it up for long-term success.
Understanding the Importance of a Digital Audit for E-commerce
A digital audit for e-commerce is a comprehensive evaluation of your online store's performance, usability, and overall customer experience.
It helps identify gaps and opportunities across key areas. This can include website design, navigation, SEO (search engine optimisation), and checkout processes. It ensures your platform is optimised for maximum impact.
When businesses invest in improving their UX (user experience) strategy—even by just 10%—they can achieve an impressive 83% boost in conversion rates[2]. This highlights the link between seamless user experiences and business success.
By prioritising UX through regular digital audits, e-commerce brands can drive higher sales and strengthen customer engagement and retention.
Here's why conducting a digital audit is essential for e-commerce businesses:
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Early Detection of Performance Issues
Audits help find and fix serious technical issues before they harm your business. They also find new performance issues you are unaware of with your online store.
This proactive problem-solving will ensure that a client's experience and conversion rate are not adversely affected.
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Improved Buying Journey
Auditing in e-commerce can be used by merchants to minimise poor engagement with customers and enhance a smooth experience. They can discover problems such as slow pages and checkout issues if they visit your site with a fresh perspective.
After all, the goal is to encourage customers to purchase as quickly as possible.
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Increased Search Engine Visibility
Online retailers can keep high search engine rankings if they detect and fix issues before they hurt SEO. E-commerce SEO audits find duplicate content and long title tags, among other issues.
Their findings may help you fix declining organic traffic and improve visibility with good SEO.
5 Key Components of an Effective E-commerce Audit
An efficient e-commerce SEO audit has several key parts. Each one improves the site's search engine visibility and user experience.
Knowing these parts lets e-commerce firms focus their SEO for the best results:
1. Technical SEO Analysis
The technological health of an e-commerce site is critical to its success. This analysis considers site speed, mobile responsiveness, HTTPS, and search engine crawlability.
Technical SEO enhances your site for easy access and indexing by search engines, helping to boost your rankings.
2. On-Page SEO Evaluation
This process evaluates your website’s SEO elements, including title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text. It also reviews on-page SEO factors like content quality, relevance, keyword usage, and internal linking.
Optimising these parts helps search engines understand your site and improves ranking.
3. Content Analysis
In digital marketing, content is supreme, especially on e-commerce websites. The goal of this analysis is to assess the uniqueness, relevance, and quality of content on your product pages and other areas of your site.
It also looks for content gaps to fill and places your website as an authority in your niche.
4. User Experience Review
To sustain the user's attention on your e-commerce site, ensure that you deliver the best experience. A UX assessment verifies the site hierarchy, sitemap, and positions of the call to action. It confirms that a user is able to locate any feature easily.
There is an increase in engagement metrics as UX improves – this is good news for search engines.
5. Backlink Analysis
Linking from other sites to your site also factors in your SEO. Backlink analysis takes a look at your link and offers a way to create better-quality links.
The backlink helps achieve a good page rank and authority for your website.
Step-by-Step E-commerce Audit Checklist
Conducting an e-commerce website audit—both before and after launch—helps uncover mistakes, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement. It can highlight strategies to enhance your site's search engine rankings and overall performance.
By addressing these insights, you can elevate both your SEO and user experience, driving better results for your business. Here's how to get started:
Step 1: Check Your Website's Speed
A slow website can lose your customers in seconds. Imagine you're a customer who clicks on a product, and it takes almost a minute to load—you'd likely leave the page.
Use page speed insight tools to check how fast (or slow) your site is. Aim for a page load time of under 2 seconds—this remains the sweet spot[3] for e-commerce sites, with pages loading within this time frame generally achieving the best conversion rates.
An excellent way to improve your homepage speed is to compress images or remove plugins.
Step 2: Evaluate Mobile Friendliness
Mobile devices are now the primary way people shop online[4]. You need a mobile-responsive site to avoid losing out on audiences.
Load your site on two different platforms, a phone and a tablet, to make the necessary assessment. If the product images do not fit the screen, then a mobile re-design is needed.
Step 3: Review Product Descriptions and Images
Clear product descriptions, easy navigation, and quality images can help your business a lot. Consider what you would expect or like to be informed of if you were the receiver or the buyer of the item.
For instance, should you be selling a jacket, be specific. Cover characteristics such as type of fabric, size and how to wash the fabric. The images should resemble the front, back, left and right view of the jacket.
Step 4: Test the Checkout Process
A seamless checkout process will help to minimise consumers' cart desertion. Visit a site as a customer, select a product to purchase, input the delivery details, and make a payment.
The point of this process is to improve your customers' daily experience on your site and fix the issues.
Step 5: Check for Broken Links
Try using plugins such as Broken Link Checker that can search and address them in no time.
For instance, if you had a link for "product X" but you've since removed it from your store, make sure the link is also removed.
Step 6: Ensure Your Site is Secure
A secure website builds trust and safeguards your customers' information. Check that your site uses "HTTPS" at the beginning of its URL—this indicates it’s secure. Adding trust badges further reassures customers that their data is safe.
If your site doesn’t have HTTPS, reach out to your hosting provider to obtain an SSL certificate and ensure your website meets modern security standards.
Step 7: Analyse SEO for Search Visibility
Your store needs to be easily found on search engines. Scan each product page to find the best keywords that align with the target keywords. Ensure the product heading and description are well presented.
If your product is hiking boots, use keywords like "waterproof hiking boots" in the title and description.
Step 8: Gather and Analyse Customer Comments
Consumer feedback reveals a company's strengths and faults, making it as valuable as gold. Check for last month's feedback regarding the products, website, or delivery problems. Modify your delivery approach if a large number of consumers are complaining about delayed deliveries.
These steps will make your e-commerce site user-friendly and fast. It will then turn visitors into loyal customers. With a well-done audit, you're setting your online store up for real, lasting success.
Technical Aspects to Assess in Your Digital Audit for E-commerce
To carry out a more technical online e-commerce business audit, do the following:
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Run a Site Crawl
The first thing to do is perform a website crawl. This crawl report reveals how Googlebot crawls a site, including where the bot goes (and does not go) and where issues may occur.
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Update Sitemap
An XML sitemap is an important component of crawlability and indexing. This tool is specifically designed for search engines, guiding them on how to interpret and process all the information on your website. This way, bots know how to index content without scanning the entire site.
For sitemap best practices, upload it to Google Search Console, then check the coverage report to fix any incorrect redirects, broken links, or missing pages.
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Check URLs, Response Codes, & On-page SEO
Ensure all URL versions are properly indexed. Also, check response codes and on-page SEO. Our experts discover the most errors in this area, although they are easy to fix.
How GrowthJockey Can Assist with Your E-commerce Audit
Carrying out a digital audit for e-commerce is a powerful step that can unlock your store's potential. By checking everything from site speed to SEO, you set up your online store for success.
Remember, even the tiniest adjustments can make a big difference in boosting sales.
Ready to take your online store to the next level? Start implementing these online e-commerce audit steps today and watch your e-commerce performance soar.
And if you're looking for expert support, don't hesitate to reach out – let's make your e-commerce vision a reality.
Ecommerce Audit FAQs
1. What is the first step of the 7-step process for e-commerce?
The first step in a 7-step process for e-commerce success is to conduct market research and analysis. This step involves researching your audience to know their needs. You should also analyse competitors to build a strong e-commerce strategy.
2. How do I set up a successful e-commerce store?
To set up an e-commerce store, plan, strategise and execute with precision. The process of setting up includes conducting market research, choosing a niche and product, and, lastly, an e-commerce platform.
3. What is an e-commerce SEO audit?
An e-commerce SEO audit evaluates your website’s SEO performance to identify gaps and improve your site’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
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