An online store audit is an ordered review of six areas that ends with a fix list ranked by what actually makes money. Those areas are: tech, speed, the purchase path, SEO, security and legal compliance. A good audit answers three questions: what specifically in this store gets in the way of buying, roughly what each fix costs, and in what order to do them.
Below I set out what such a review should contain, how to check most of it yourself, and how to tell a report that changes something from twenty pages of screenshots.
What a store audit covers
The scope fits into six areas. Each one is checked with different tools and each one accounts for a different kind of lost money.
| Area | What I check | What I am looking for |
|---|---|---|
| Tech | PHP version, plugins, theme, error logs, hosting | crashes, conflicts, dead code, an overloaded server |
| Speed | load time on a phone, Core Web Vitals | pages that lose the customer before they appear |
| Purchase path | product page, cart, checkout, payments, delivery | the places where people drop off |
| SEO | indexing, category structure, content, duplicates | traffic the store is not collecting although it could |
| Security | backups, access, certificate, updates | the risk that one bad day wipes out a year of work |
| Compliance | terms, returns, invoices and KSeF, accessibility | things that are mandatory, not optional |
A store can be beautiful and still lose orders in all six areas at once. That is why an audit starts with measurements, not with an opinion about the design.
Tech - the foundation nobody sees
The technical layer is the engine: PHP version, the plugin set, the theme and the server. I check whether anything is throwing errors in the background, how many plugins actually do something, and whether the hosting keeps up with the traffic. The things that come up most often:
- Ghost plugins - a dozen-odd add-ons, half of them disabled or not updated in years, still slowing the site down and widening the attack surface
- An old PHP version - the store works, but slower, and some newer plugins simply will not run on it
- A theme modified directly - every update wipes the changes, so nobody updates, so the store ages
- Shared hosting picked for a brochure site, not for a store with a thousand products and several integrations
This is the boring part of an audit and at the same time the part that most often explains the rest of the results. A slow checkout is usually not a checkout problem, but a problem with what sits underneath it.
Speed - measured on a phone, not on your laptop
Store speed is measured on a phone and on a mobile connection, because in the stores I look at, phone traffic usually outweighs desktop. Your computer has the store in its cache and will show a better result than a new customer sees.
In an audit I look at three things: when the first meaningful content appears, when the page stops jumping under a finger, and how fast it reacts to the first tap. Those are Core Web Vitals and Google publishes them for every site. How to take that measurement yourself, step by step, I described in the speed mini audit with PageSpeed Insights - fifteen minutes and a real point of reference before any conversation about fixes.
I always measure four page types separately: the homepage, a product page, a category listing with filters and the cart. The results can differ dramatically, and the worst of them usually belongs to the page most people walk through. The causes of slowdown are repetitive: unscaled images, plugins loading their own scripts on every page, and filters querying the database on every click. I break the causes down in the piece on why a WooCommerce store runs slowly.
The purchase path - where customers actually drop off
The purchase path is the road from landing on a product page to confirming an order. In an audit I walk it myself, on a phone, as an ordinary customer - payment included, on a test order.
What I check, in order:
- Product page - are price, availability and shipping time visible without scrolling
- Add to cart - does it give clear feedback, or throw you somewhere unknown
- Cart - is the delivery cost known before checkout, or only at the very end
- Checkout - how many fields are genuinely required, can you buy without creating an account
- Payments - is BLIK there (the Polish phone-code payment standard) alongside instant bank transfer, does the gateway throw errors on mobile
- After the purchase - does the confirmation email arrive at all, and does it land in spam
The last point sounds trivial and is one of the more common findings: the store takes orders, the customer gets no confirmation, then calls or cancels. The technical rather than psychological reasons for abandoned carts I described separately.
Store SEO - can Google see your goods at all
A store SEO audit checks whether product and category pages are indexed, whether they compete with each other and whether they have content that gives them a chance of showing up. It is a different job from company-site SEO, because a store has thousands of pages and most problems come from structure, not from a single piece of text.
The things checked most often:
- Indexing - how many pages Google actually has in the index relative to the product count
- Filters and sorting - do they generate hundreds of duplicate URLs that dilute the value of a category
- Categories - do they have their own description and a sensible name, because it is categories, not products, that catch broad phrases
- Product descriptions - are they copied verbatim from the wholesaler’s feed, identical to ten other stores
The general review method I described in the step-by-step SEO audit checklist.
Security and legal compliance
This part of the audit answers the question of what happens on a bad day. I check whether backups exist, where they live and whether anyone has ever tried to restore one - a backup nobody has tested is not a backup, it is hope. Plus: how current the core and plugins are, admin accounts left behind by former contractors, and certificate validity.
On the legal side I check three things that are mandatory today:
| Topic | Status as of July 2026 | What it means for a store |
|---|---|---|
| KSeF (Poland’s mandatory e-invoicing system) | in force - largest businesses from February 2026, everyone else from April 2026 | invoices must reach the system, so the order-to-invoice flow has to be sorted out |
| Digital accessibility (EAA) | in force across the EU since June 2025 | the store must be operable with a keyboard, with readable contrast and alt text |
| Information duties | unchanged | terms, returns, contact details and delivery costs visible before purchase |
This is not legal advice, just a list of places where the technical side has to catch up with the rules. Confirm the details with your accountant or lawyer.
What a good audit report looks like
A good report has the form of a task list, not an essay. Every finding should carry four elements: what is wrong, how we know (a specific measurement), what happens if we leave it, and roughly what the fix costs. Without the last point you cannot turn a report into a decision. For priorities I use a simple grid:
| Priority | Character | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Critical | blocks sales or risks data loss | a checkout error, no backups |
| 2. High return | cheap to fix, clearly visible to the customer | uncompressed images, delivery cost hidden until the end |
| 3. Planned | big impact, but needs a project | rebuilding the category structure, changing hosting |
| 4. Cosmetic | improves the impression, will not move numbers this quarter | small visual tweaks, new icons |
Red flag: a report made entirely of screenshots from free scanners with not a single hint about what to do on Monday morning. Second red flag: an audit whose conclusion is always to build the store again from scratch. Sometimes that genuinely is the cheapest route, but far more often a refresh of the visual layer without rebuilding the engine is enough.
How long it takes and where to start
Reviewing a medium-sized store is usually a few hours of measurement and half a day to write up the conclusions. The repair itself is a separate matter and depends on what turns up.
With me we start with a free diagnosis: I look at the store, measure speed, walk the purchase path and say plainly whether I see anything that is genuinely costing you orders. If so - you get a priority list. For bigger work there is always a written quote before the start: projects are billed fixed-bid, most often in the 5,000-10,000 PLN net range, and the steady rhythm of updates and backups is handled under ongoing support - Basic from 1,000, Pro from 2,000, Premium from 3,500 PLN net per month. The audit itself commits you to nothing.
Frequently asked questions
What is an online store audit? An ordered review of the store covering tech, speed, the purchase path, SEO, security and legal compliance. It ends with a list of specific fixes with priorities and cost estimates, not with a score out of ten. The goal is to point out where the store loses orders.
How much does an online store audit cost? With me the initial diagnosis is free - I look at the store, measure it and say whether I see problems worth fixing. Pricing for the work goes out in writing before anything starts. Market prices vary wildly, so always ask exactly what will be in the report.
What is the difference between a store UX audit and an SEO audit? A UX audit checks whether a person who is already in the store can comfortably buy - product page, cart, checkout, payments and delivery. An SEO audit checks whether that person has any chance of finding the store from search in the first place. One without the other limps: traffic without conversion is a burnt budget, and a great purchase path without traffic is an empty store.
Can I check the store myself? Yes, a good part of it needs no code. Measure speed on a phone in PageSpeed Insights, place a test order with a real payment, check that the confirmation email arrives, and count in Google how many of your pages are in the index. The rest needs a deeper look.
Running a store where something does not work the way it should? I build and rebuild WooCommerce stores - from a single fix to reworking the whole sales flow. Tell me what you are dealing with and I will send back a scope and a price.