David Morey 
Do you know what to do if your online store stops generating stable profits? So, it’s time to conduct an audit. This term means a comprehensive check of your website, allowing you to identify problem areas. The audit helps to detect and eliminate the causes of declining sales, track user behavior, ensure the safety of the site, and solve other problems.
Before conducting an audit, it is important to check the relevance of the CMS of your online store. It has been repeatedly stated by software developers providing magento 2 upgrade services. They stated that outdated CMSs are incompatible with modern technologies and are vulnerable to hacker attacks. Such engines are not supported by developers; therefore, they are not improved and regularly produce errors.
Audit Stages
The basic set of works for testing an online store includes four stages:
- Search for technical problems. Here, you can check the speed of page loading, the quality of site search, the operation of user tools, and other functions.
- SEO check. Here, you can study meta tags, keywords, and links. At this stage, it is important to highlight key phrases that have the greatest impact on traffic. It will help optimize your online store in the future.
- Studying competitors. If users prefer to buy goods on other sites, it means that competitors’ sites offer something that you do not have. It could be free shipping, a bonus system, discounts when logging into your personal account, and other marketing moves. You can also make attractive offers to your customers to turn one-time visitors into regular customers.
- Checking published content. In addition to SEO optimization, it is important to take care of the quality of publications from the point of view of readers. If product descriptions are interesting to users and contain valuable information, people will be happy to buy the products.
There are other types of audits that your site may need. For example, you may find it useful to audit marketing activities to assess the effectiveness of an online store.
It is equally important to monitor the interaction of visitors with the interface: clicks, transitions, and other actions. You also need to thoroughly test the operation of the mobile version of the site because most users make purchases from smartphones and tablets. They will prefer to go to competitors if the site is inconvenient to use on a small screen.
How Do You Understand That Your Online Store Needs An Audit?
Comprehensive website testing is carried out in the following cases:
- the site has just opened and is not making a profit;
- the engine has not been updated for a long time, so problems are often observed in its operation;
- the site requires high-quality SEO optimization;
- sales have decreased significantly or remain at the same level;
- website design needs to be updated;
- the bounce rate is too high.
It is necessary to conduct an audit of an online store even in the absence of the listed problems. Experts recommend doing it at least once every 2 years. Also, testing the Internet site will be useful before launching an advertising campaign.
What To Do With The Audit Results?
After analyzing the problems, you need to evaluate priorities and correct shortcomings. For example, you may need SEO optimization to rank your online store higher in search engine results, improve the user interface, develop a new design, or implement profitable marketing programs. Sometimes, even cosmetic changes attract the attention of users and contribute to increased sales. Therefore, be sure to identify the real shortcomings of the website and strive to eliminate them.
