Do I require a site audit for my Magento store? Could I use an audit to make my Magento store stand out from the competition? Well, there is a resounding “yes” to each of these queries. No matter how well-optimized your website is, there are reasonable risks that might arise when you are running a Magento store. Running a Magento audit is the best option to find and fix those problems immediately.
We’ll go through the benefits of thoroughly auditing your Magento website in this blog article and the methods needed to carry it out.
Where should you begin?
You can hire a Magento developer to complete it. However, we are assuming that you wish to do everything yourself. Well, it’s not complicated, but you will need professional assistance at some point. How challenging could it be if you are doing it yourself? From our experience, it might not be easy, but you can overcome those challenges effectively if you are well-organized. Once you complete the audit, you need to have an actionable, ready-to-use report produced after a thorough analysis of every area of your store, which you can then use as a manual to optimize your website.
Magento Audit: Step-by-step Process
- Establish your website’s objectives and standards for running the audit.
- Investigate Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to examine the performance of your website at the moment. Examine the mix of traffic, seasonal variations, alterations in marketing behavior, and top pages.
- Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or GTmetrix to assess your website’s speed and find improvement areas.
- To ensure a flawless user experience, use Google Search Console’s The Crawl problems report to find broken links and 404 issues.
- To give visitors a satisfying experience, assess your website’s usability, navigation menus, load times, and mobile friendliness.
Now, let us get into the details.
Magento Code Audit
Magento is a platform with many components and a complicated code base. The audit in question is the most technical one. Deep technical understanding is necessary for code review. Customers will notice and prefer it even if your shop is tidy but functional. If it’s buggy, they’re more likely to leave. It is crucial to resolve these issues.
Finding and solving faults and errors is less enjoyable than introducing new features to the store. But it’s an important job. Ensure all cases are tracked and documented in the team’s bug tracker. Note the procedures required to reproduce each bug. Focus more on the issues the user will encounter when traveling down the critical path: the route they must follow to locate your goods and make a successful purchase. Directly altering Magento Core is terrible programming practice. It can lead to various issues; the solution is to update the latest Magento version.
Security
The security of your store should never be in question. Your store should have a database that is quick and secure. During the Magento store audits, security is one element that needs major attention. If the store is built on a solid database, security is a major factor it offers. You need to ensure your store runs the most recent version of Magento.
Review of UI/UX
Although hiring a professional to undertake a Magento UX audit is typically more advantageous, you can still do it yourself. Watch out for the alleged “blurring” effect. This is, where you’ve visited your store so frequently that you’ve grown numb to the user experience issues. It’s a result of having a deep understanding of the product and not having enough sympathy for people using it for the first time. The good news is that you can still take a 1000 times closer look at your store to identify areas for improvement. Please refrain from assuming you understand your users’ thoughts or how they engage with your website. The primary error made by all beginners is this. Just proceed while keeping an open mind about everything. If you include other individuals in your audit, prepare to be astounded by how surprisingly and differently each person navigates through your store and interacts with menu items and UI components. This method gives you a lot of insight that can broaden your outlook and cause you to reconsider some issues.
Speed Review
Users’ experiences, sales, and conversion depend on page speed. Customers will quit your website and prefer to purchase from rival websites if they experience slow response times. We advise prioritizing speed optimization if you want to provide a positive client experience, improve conversion rates, and achieve high search engine rankings.
Take the following actions while optimizing Magento’s speed.
- Examine the effects of extensions, eliminate any elements that aren’t necessary, and review your theme’s speed optimization.
- Examine setup options include flattening the catalog, implementing lazy loading for photos, using Elasticsearch for search results, and optimizing cache settings.
- Improve backend caching and think about utilizing Varnish or a full-page cache.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) if your audience is international. By doing this, you can be sure that your data centers are accessible in the areas where your visitors are located.
- Consider latency, cost-benefit analysis, necessary functionality, and monitoring tools when evaluating CDN speed.
Conclusion
To make sure your online store operates at its best in terms of performance, security, and user experience, you must run a detailed Magento website audit following this checklist. You can improve your website’s visibility, draw more organic traffic, and increase conversions by addressing potential problems and optimizing crucial areas.
Refer to this checklist to keep your Magento website development current and competitive in the constantly changing eCommerce industry. In 2023 and beyond, an adequately assessed and optimized website will be a robust platform for online business success.
