How to audit an ecommerce website

1. Start with commercial context

Document the target customer, main products, traffic mix, conversion rate, average order value, acquisition cost, margin and repeat rate. Without this baseline, an audit becomes a list of design opinions.

2. Test customer clarity

A first-time visitor should understand what is sold, who it is for, why it is different and what to do next. Check the homepage, collection pages and product pages on mobile first.

• Clear value proposition above the fold
• Specific product benefits and evidence
• Visible pricing, delivery and return expectations
• Logical product discovery and comparison
• Trust signals placed near decisions

3. Inspect the purchase path

Walk from landing page to confirmation on multiple devices. Look for slow pages, hidden costs, forced account creation, confusing variants, broken promotions, payment limitations and unnecessary fields.

4. Verify measurement

Confirm analytics, advertising pixels, consent handling and ecommerce events. Test product views, add-to-cart, checkout and purchase values. A site cannot be improved responsibly when its events are duplicated, missing or mislabelled.

5. Prioritise by impact and evidence

Rank issues by expected commercial impact, confidence and implementation effort. Fix critical technical failures first, then high-confidence conversion problems, then run controlled experiments on uncertain ideas.