If you’d own a car, you’d take it to a check up ever so often, right? 

Or better yet—do you perform regular health check ups (Hint: you should)?
Well, performing an ecommerce site audit is like giving your online store a thorough check-up, ensuring it’s running at peak performance. 

And this comprehensive 2025 guide will walk you through every aspect of the process, from evaluating user experience and SEO to optimizing conversion rates and marketing efforts. 

With our detailed checklist, you’ll be equipped to identify and fix issues, ultimately driving more traffic, increasing conversions, and boosting your overall business success.

What Is an Ecommerce Website Audit?

An ecommerce website audit evaluates an online store’s performance and overall effectiveness. 

The main purpose of auditing your webshop to identify areas for improvement. This can be either to enhance your store’s functionality, drive more traffic, increase conversions—or all of this together. 

Think of it as an ecommerce health check-up, which you should do from time to time—whether it is performing or not.

When conducting the ecommerce audit, you can look at technical stuff like user experience (UX), technical and backend stuff, and security. 

However, since we are an ecommerce marketing agency, we will focus on the marketing and sales aspect of the ecommerce store audit, which can include factors like:

• Growth metrics including new customers, sales, scaling opportunities
• Ad metrics like costs and return on investment
• Ad channel performances from organic to paid

…and many more. 

But we’ll dive into all that in a minute. First…

Why You Should Audit Your Ecommerce Website?

If your body feels off, you’ll visit a doctor. If your car or laptop shows signs of bad performance, you’ll take it for check-up. Or you’ll do it routinely, even when all feels fine.

It’s the same with your ecommerce store.

Auditing ecommerce store’s health will ensure you the success and growth of your online business. Here’s why you should consider performing one:

• Identify Performance Issues: An audit helps uncover technical problems that may be slowing down your website, such as poor site speed or broken links. These issues can negatively impact user experience and lead to higher bounce rates.
  
• Improve User Experience: By analyzing the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, an audit reveals areas where your website may be confusing or difficult to navigate. Enhancing UX can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased conversions.
  
• Boost Your Marketing Efforts: An audit examines the channels you use to promote your brand and ensures that you’re not bleeding money on bad optimization or wrong promotional platofrms.
  
• Increase Conversion Rates: The audit assesses the effectiveness of your conversion funnel, including product pages, checkout processes, and calls to action. By identifying and addressing barriers to conversion, you can turn more visitors into paying customers.

• Stay Competitive: Regular audits keep you informed about the latest ecommerce trends and best practices, allowing you to stay ahead of the competition and adapt to changing market demands.

In summary, an ecommerce website audit is a proactive step towards improving your site’s performance, enhancing user satisfaction, and driving greater business success.

…so do it well.

What To Look For When Auditing Your Ecommerce Store

To conduct a real, thorough ecommerce website audit, you’ll need to start with the basics—and then move on to the numbers.

So first, the basics. Here’s what you might need look out for when you start your audit.

Website Speed

Website speed is crucial for eCommerce success. 

A slow site can frustrate users. Remember, attention span among your users is pretty low—and patience even lower. A slouching, loading website can lead to high bounce rates and lost sales.

Key metrics to monitor include:

• Page load time
• Time to First Byte (TTFB)
• Core Web Vitals lik largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). 

Most of these things you can check up on the backend—using Google Search Console to check up on Core Web Vitals, or free third-party website checkup tools you can find on Google.

A free checkup we did on a website we simply Googled. Yes, we have stuff to fix.

What if metrics aren’t good: Solutions include optimizing images—either removing unnecessary ones or reducing their size, or both, leveraging browser caching, minimizing CSS and JavaScript, and using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce server response times. 

Do these audits regularly to ensure your site remains fast, enhancing user experience and boosting conversion rates.

User Experience

User experience (UX) is vital as it represents how your customers, well… experience your website. Obviously. 

A bad user experience will directly impact customer satisfaction and conversions. Leaving them confused, and frustrated, and your ecommerce store website with a bad reputation. 

On the other hand, a seamless, intuitive UX keeps visitors engaged—encouraging them to explore and make purchases. 

Huel’s website is a great example of an easy-to-navigate website, smooth checkout experience, and non-disruptive upsells and cross-sells throughout the proces.

To replicate it, key areas to focus on include navigation clarity, mobile responsiveness, ease of checkout, and accessibility. 

If your analytics show high bounce rate, low click-through-rate, a lot of cart abandonments, or incomplete checkouts, you might want to fix your ecommerce website UX a little.

To improve UX, you should conduct usability testing, simplify menus, ensure clear call-to-action buttons, and streamline the checkout process. 

Do these UX audits from time to time to have higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

SEO Perfromance

With Google pushing e-comerce more and more in recent years, your store will benefit from a good search engine optimization.

We aren’t an SEO agency so we won’t go too deep into ecommerce SEO audit, but we can discuss the basics.

For starters, proper SEO ensures that search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank your pages, making your products more visible to potential customers.

Key parameters include site structure, URL optimization, meta tags, keyword usage, and internal linking. Issues like broken links, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages can negatively impact your rankings. 

To solve these, conduct regular SEO audits, fix technical errors, optimize meta descriptions and titles, and ensure your content is keyword-rich and user-friendly. This enhances search visibility and drives targeted traffic.

For SEO audits, it’s best to look for an ecommerce SEO agency that specializes in this approach.

Conversion Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is essential for maximizing the value of your eCommerce traffic. 

It essentially turns your visitors into customers and is something we are emphasizing a lot during our ecommerce audit. 

A good optimization focuses on refining elements that influence purchasing decisions, such as clear CTAs, user-friendly navigation, compelling product descriptions, and streamlined checkout processes. 

Poorly designed pages or complex checkout steps can lead to cart abandonment and lost sales. 

To improve CRO, analyze user behavior, A/B test key elements, simplify the purchasing process and optimize for mobile users. We’ll talk about it a bit more in the next section.

Key Metrics You Should Look For When Auditing Your Ecommerce Store’s Sales and Marketing Pefrormance

Even if you know your metrics, you might not know whether they’re underperforming or overperforming—and how to fix them.

That’s exactly why we separated three key sales and marketing metric groups that you’ll have to pay attention to. We’ll go through them, but you make sure to note them somewhere. 

Because you’re going to need them soon.

Ecommerce Store Metrics

When ti comess to ecommrece store metrics, most of data you can fetch directly from Shopify—or other ecommerce platform that you use, such as Wix or Woocommerce.

Since we’re a Shopify Marketing Agency, we’re mostly using stuff you can easily get from Shopify. 

But if you set up analytics on your platform’s backend, getting these numbers should be smooth in any case:

• Gross revenue: This is your total revenue, including discounts, refunds, etc.
• Net revenue: Remove discounts and refunds, and 
• Total revenue: This is a Shopify-only metric that adds back shipping & tax collected on orders. If you’re not on Shopify, you can use gross sales.
• Returning customer rev: A percentage of your total revenue.
• COGS (%): Average 30% of gross revenue, usually.
• Operating cost (%): Average 40% of gross revenue.
• Discounts given cost
• Refund cost 
• Shipping cost amount: Only the cost to ship.
• Website User Sessions

Believe it or not, this is all the data you need so you can calculate stuff like Operating costs, Ads customer acquisition cost, revenue per user session, lifetime value, and more.

Or better yet, you can use our calculator below to do it on its own. So just make sure you get those numbers.

Ecommerce Order Metrics

Now that we’ve sorted the store metrics, here are most ecommerce order metrics you should know:

• Total number of orders: You can fetch these from your Shopify or other ecommerce backend.
• Total number of customers: Total number of different customers from your website.
• Ad purchase conversions and/or orders: All orders from ad platforms
• Email and SMS orders: If you’re using this marketing channel, you can get the data from your email automation tool, Google Analytics, or CMS backend (Shopify).
• Organic orders: You can get this from Google Analytics or Shopify
• Direct orders: Also get this from Google Analyitcs or Shopify
• Unattributed orders: Affiliate or referral orders draft orders, Amazon, etc. If this number is negative you have channels overlapping orders.

A lot of these data you can get in your analytics tools—from email to organic. BUt if you’re not sure how to set up Google Analytics tracking, you can reach out to us for help.

Ecommerce Ads Metrics

Finally, here’s the data you’ll need to get so you can calculate ad performance:

• Ad spend: Total ad spend, from all platforms. Combined.
• Ad conversion value
• Total cost per click (CPC)
• Total click-through-rate (CTR)
• Total cost-per-mille (CPM) 

By putting this in our calculator, you’ll be able to see if your ad efforts are working. Here’s a little example:

Bur now, it’s time to get to the gist—how to perform an ecommerce store audit. 

Perform a Full Ecommerce Store Audit With Ecommerce Website Calculator

The easiest way to perform a full ecommerce audit is to use the free ecommerce store audit tool that we’ve built for the sole reason of helping our clients evaluate their store performance.

And our performance, too.

What you have to do is basically input the numbers we’ve mentioned above—the most important metrics we use to evaluate store and ad performance—and input them into the calculator.

Once you do this, you’ll be presented with an extensive breakdown of your entire store performance. 

Here’s a little sneak preview:

This breakdown will help you get a deep, extensive overview on how you fare on the market, how you fare against your competitors—and whether your current strategy is profitable and scalable. 

The best part: Next to each of these results, you’ll find bullet points and ways that you can fix this issue all by yourself. Here’s an example:

So go ahead, give it a try and let us know if it works for you.

Check the Numbers

By now, you know that conducting a thorough e-commerce site audit is crucial.

It will help you maintain a healthy and successful online store, identify and address weaknesses and implement changes that will enhance your store’s functionality.

Not only that, but customers will love it too! And of course, you’ll probably sell more.

So, take the time to audit your ecommerce site—it’s an investment in your store’s long-term growth and success.