When we audit a store, roughly 80 percent of the findings come from a checklist anyone could run, and about 20 percent come from tooling and experience. This article is the 80 percent, given away in full.
Why give it away? Because most of these points need no developer, no budget, and no agency: they need an honest hour with your own store and your phone. The store owners who run this list themselves and then hire us for the remaining 20 percent are our favorite clients, because we skip straight to the hard problems.
Two ground rules before you start. First, do the whole audit on your phone, on mobile data, not on your office computer with a warm cache; that is where your customers are. Second, write down what you find as you go, because a finding without a note becomes a vague bad feeling by tomorrow.
Here are the 20 points, grouped the way we group them.
Performance (points 1 to 4)
1. Homepage load speed on mobile. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights (free, from Google) and look at Largest Contentful Paint on mobile: Google's "good" threshold is 2.5 seconds, and most stores we first test sit well above it.
2. Product page speed. Test your best-selling product page the same way, because that is where paid traffic lands and where slowness costs actual ad money, not just bounce rate.
3. Image weight. Open a product image in a new browser tab and check its dimensions: if you are serving 3000-pixel camera originals into 400-pixel grid tiles, you have found your cheapest big win.
4. Time to first byte. In your browser's Network tab (F12), the first request to your domain should respond in under 400 milliseconds; consistently over 800 milliseconds means your hosting is slow before a single image loads.
Checkout friction (points 5 to 9)
5. Steps from product to paid. Count every tap from "add to cart" to the payment confirmation screen: good stores do it in 3 to 5 taps, and every extra step is measurable abandonment.
6. Guest checkout. Try to buy without creating an account; if you cannot, you are turning away first-time buyers to build a customer database most stores never use.
7. Surprise costs. Note when shipping cost first becomes visible: good stores show it on the cart page or earlier, because costs first revealed at the final payment step are the most-cited reason for cart abandonment in nearly every industry survey.
8. Mobile form quality. On your phone, check that the email field brings up the email keyboard, the phone field brings up the number pad, and address autocomplete works; every mistyped field on a phone is a chance to give up.
9. Payment options. Check you offer the one or two wallet options your customers actually use (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, depending on your market), because typing card numbers on a phone is a friction tax you can simply remove.
Merchandising (points 10 to 13)
10. Product photos answer real questions. Look at your top product and ask whether a stranger could judge size, texture, and context from the photos alone; good product pages show scale (on a person, next to a familiar object), not just white-background glamour shots.
11. Product descriptions sell, not describe. Read your best-seller's description aloud and check it answers "what does this do for me" in the first two lines rather than opening with materials and dimensions.
12. Out-of-stock handling. Find a sold-out product and see what happens: good stores show a "notify me" option or suggest the nearest alternative, bad stores show a dead end, and terrible stores 404 the page and lose its SEO value.
13. Search that survives typos. Search your store for a top product with one letter misspelled; if the result is "0 products found" instead of the product, your search is quietly losing sales daily.
Trust signals (points 14 to 16)
14. Reviews are visible and plausible. Check that product reviews exist, appear near the buy button, and include some imperfect ones, because a wall of unanimous five-star reviews reads as fake even when it is genuine.
15. Policies are findable in two taps. From a product page, time how long it takes to find your return policy; if it takes more than two taps, the doubt it would have resolved becomes an abandoned cart instead.
16. Contact details are real. Confirm the site shows a working email or phone number and a real business identity in the footer, because "no way to reach a human" is one of the fastest trust killers for a first-time buyer.
SEO basics (points 17 to 20)
17. Titles are written for searchers. Look at your top five products in Google (search site:yourdomain.com) and check each title reads like something a buyer would type, not "Home | Store | Product SKU-2231".
18. One product, one URL. Check whether the same product is reachable at multiple URLs (with and without category paths, with tracking parameters); duplicates split your ranking signals, and a canonical tag fixes it.
19. Category pages have content. Open your biggest category page and check there is at least a short paragraph of real text on it, because a bare grid of products gives search engines almost nothing to rank.
20. The basics are switched on. Verify your store is connected to Google Search Console, has a submitted sitemap, and is not accidentally set to "discourage search engines" (it happens more often than anyone admits, usually left over from the staging site).
How to score it
Do not compute a percentage; triage instead. Sort your notes into three piles: fix this week (typically points 3, 6, 7, 20), fix this month (most checkout and merchandising items), and needs help (usually the performance findings with structural causes). In our experience the first pile alone, done honestly, moves conversion more than any single tool purchase.
The honest limitation of any checklist: it tells you what is wrong, not how much each item is costing you or in which order to fix things for your store specifically. Point 1 failing might be a $200 image fix or a symptom of a theme that needs rebuilding, and the checklist cannot tell you which.
If you want it done for you
That prioritization is the 20 percent we did not give away, because it requires measuring your actual store. Our store audit runs all of this plus the tooling layer (profiling, database analysis, analytics review), tells you which two or three findings are actually costing you sales, and hands you a fix plan with effort estimates. It is $490 fixed, and if you go ahead with a rebuild, the full audit fee is credited toward it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I audit my ecommerce website myself? Work through a structured checklist on your phone, not your desktop, covering speed, checkout, merchandising, trust, and SEO, and write down every finding. The 20 points above are the exact list we use; a careful pass takes about an hour and needs no paid tools.
How often should I audit my online store? A full pass twice a year, plus a quick checkout-only test (points 5 to 9) after any theme change, plugin update, or new payment method. Stores drift: every change is made for a good reason and nobody re-tests the whole buying journey afterward.
What tools do I need for an ecommerce audit? For this checklist, only free ones: PageSpeed Insights for speed, your browser's Network tab for requests and server response, Google Search Console for indexing, and your own phone on mobile data for everything else. Paid tools add depth, but they mostly automate what the free pass already reveals.
What is included in a professional store audit? Everything on a checklist like this, plus the parts that need instrumentation: performance profiling to find which plugin or query is slow, database and hosting analysis, analytics review to see where real users drop off, and a prioritized fix plan. The deliverable that matters is the priority order with effort estimates, not the list of findings itself.