What Is in a Shopify Store Audit? A 40-Point Framework

You have been offered a Shopify store audit. Probably more than one. Each promises to find what is holding your growth back, and each is priced as though the findings are the valuable part. You have no real way to judge what is inside before you pay.

So here is what is inside. This is the Shopify store audit framework we work through, organised into twelve areas and roughly forty checks. You can run a credible first pass yourself in an afternoon. Where you cannot, you will at least know what a proper ecommerce site audit should cover and what a thin one is missing.

Start with the data, because everything else depends on it

Most audits skip this and go straight to screenshots of the homepage. That is backwards. If the tracking is wrong, every conclusion drawn from it is wrong too.

• Do Shopify orders and GA4 purchase events agree within a few percent? A gap of 20% or more means one of them is broken.
• Is consent handled properly for UK and EU visitors, and do you know what share of traffic you are simply not seeing?
• Are conversion events firing once per order, with no duplicates from an old pixel or a forgotten app?
• Is checkout tracked as a funnel rather than a single event, so you can see where people leave?

What failure looks like: a dashboard that says conversion rate is 0.9% when Shopify says 1.6%, and nobody has noticed for six months.

Technical performance and Core Web Vitals

Google's thresholds are public: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. A single lab test in Lighthouse is not the same thing, and a Shopify CRO audit that only quotes a Lighthouse score has not looked hard enough.

• Field data (Search Console or CrUX) for product and collection templates, not just the homepage
• The Largest Contentful Paint element identified: usually a hero or product image that is oversized, or lazy-loaded when it should not be
• Layout shift on mobile from late-loading banners, review widgets and announcement bars
• Total JavaScript weight, and how much of it is third party

Failure looks like a mobile product page that takes four seconds to become usable. The fixes are in our guide to Shopify site speed and Core Web Vitals.

Discovery: navigation, search and filtering

• Can a first-time visitor reach any product in three taps from the homepage?
• Does the menu reflect how customers think about the range, or how the warehouse is organised?
• Does site search return sensible results for your top 20 queries, including misspellings and synonyms?
• Do filters exist on large collections, and do they work on mobile without hiding the products?

Failure looks like a search for your best-selling product that returns an accessory first.

Collection pages

• Is the key buying information (price, variants, availability, rating) visible on the product card without a click?
• Are the sort options useful, and is the default sort a deliberate choice rather than whatever was set at launch?
• Is there any content on the page beyond a grid, for both shoppers and search engines?

Product pages, where the sale is decided

This is the section most audits get right, because it is the most visible. It is still where most of the value sits.

• Is the primary call to action visible without scrolling on a mobile screen?
• Do images show the product in use, at scale, and from the angles a buyer in a shop would want?
• Are delivery cost and timing stated on the page, not discovered at checkout?
• Are variants clear, with out-of-stock options handled honestly rather than silently?
• Does the description answer objections, or just repeat the supplier's copy?
• Are reviews real, recent and specific to the product being viewed?

Failure is a page that answers 'what is it' and never 'why should I trust you'.

Cart and checkout

Baymard's running average puts cart abandonment at just over 70% across the studies it tracks. Some of that is browsing behaviour you cannot change. Some of it is friction you can.

• Is the total cost, including delivery, visible in the cart before checkout begins?
• Are express payment options (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal) present and not buried?
• Is guest checkout available and obvious?
• Is the discount code field sending people off to hunt for codes they never come back from?
• Is there anything in the cart drawer or checkout that distracts from completing the order?

Mobile, end to end

Published benchmarks consistently show mobile converting at well under desktop rates, often around two thirds of it, while sending the majority of sessions. That gap is the single biggest opportunity on most stores, and it usually goes unmeasured because everyone on the team reviews the site on a laptop.

• Walk the full journey on a real mid-range Android phone over mobile data, not a resized desktop browser
• Check tap targets, sticky elements that cover content, and keyboards that hide the field being typed into
• Check that the mobile menu, filters and variant pickers actually work with a thumb

Trust and reassurance

• Contact details, returns policy and delivery information reachable from every page
• Consistent presentation: no leftover theme demo content, no broken images, no dead links in the footer
• Third-party proof placed where the doubt occurs, not collected on an about page nobody reads

Retention hooks

• Is the post-purchase experience (confirmation, shipping updates, follow-up email) doing any selling at all?
• Is there a reason to create an account, and is the account area worth logging into?
• Are email and SMS capture points earning more than they cost in annoyance?

SEO foundations

• Indexation: are filtered collections and tag pages creating thousands of thin URLs?
• Do product and collection titles and descriptions describe what is sold, or are they the theme defaults?
• Are canonical tags correct on products that live in several collections?
• Is product structured data valid, so price and availability can appear in search results?

The app stack, and what it really costs

Every app you install is a small tax on speed, on maintenance and on your monthly bill. It is common to find a store running 30 apps and actively using half of them.

• List every installed app, its monthly cost, and who on the team can say what it does
• Identify which apps inject scripts into the storefront and what each one adds to load time
• Find leftover code from uninstalled apps still sitting in the theme
• Check for functional overlap: two review apps, three pop-up tools, a bundle app alongside a native bundle setup

Failure looks like £600 a month in subscriptions and a theme file nobody dares touch.

What an audit cannot do

Here is the honest part. A findings document is worth very little on its own. Stores commission a 60-page audit PDF, agree with all of it, and change nothing, because the agency that wrote it was not the one delivering and the in-house team had no capacity. That is the most common way audit money gets wasted.

The value is in the fixes, and in the order you make them. A real audit ends with a prioritised plan: what is costing the most, what is cheapest to fix, and what should be tested before it is rolled out. Then someone has to do the work. That is why we tend to run audits as the first month of a Conversion Growth Retainer rather than as a standalone product, though our conversion rate optimisation service can start from an audit you already have.

A long PDF with no delivery attached is the most expensive way to learn what you already suspected.

What to do with this list

Run through it yourself first. Be strict, and use a phone. If the tracking is off, stop there and fix it, because nothing else can be judged until it is. If you find plenty of traffic but disappointing sales, you are in the same position as most brands we speak to. It is not a traffic problem, it is a conversion problem. Our guide to CRO for UK Shopify stores explains what a structured programme looks like from there.

If you would rather have a senior team run the audit and then fix what it finds, we are based in Glasgow, work with brands across the UK and beyond, and have been doing this for over twelve years. Get in touch and tell us what your numbers are doing. We will tell you honestly whether an audit is the right next step.