Magento website audits are regular check-ups that ensure that your website is in top shape and running smoothly. These audits play a pivotal role in promptly identifying any sort of underlying defects or hidden issues that may be unknowingly affecting your website performance.
Magento, also popular as Adobe Commerce, is a robust platform that is capable of creating and efficiently managing extensive online stores. It provides in-built creative solutions to your customers in the best possible way. Its feature-rich environment empowers store owners to manage, scale, and expand as needed. This is likely why most successful brands opt for Magento when building an online store.
However, maintaining a Magento online store and ensuring it is performing at its best is no simple task. Even a single loophole that you may have overlooked can significantly impact user experience and brand credibility. This is where conducting a Magento audit and that too periodically becomes essential.
What is a Magento Website Audit?
A Magento website audit thoroughly examines all functionality, code, and security components of your website. Here, the aim is to identify any underlying causes of performance issues and improve them instantly. Consider, for example, if you have some creepy bug in your website, visitors may find themselves unable to access the required information due to poor site speed promptly. Such delays prompt users to leave the site or abandon their carts, directly affecting both user experience and conversion rates.
In such cases, a Magento website audit comes to your rescue by providing a detailed report on your website’s health. It offers a comprehensive insight into areas that require immediate attention to boost your website performance. These Magento Audits are not limited to speed and performance alone. They consist of various types of assessments that evaluate different parameters and the functioning of a website.
So, let’s dive in.
What are the different Types of Audits?
- Magento SEO Audit
Website visibility and ranking play a major role in ensuring that your eCommerce store is running at its best. To improve visibility and secure a top-ranking position, it is important to evaluate your website’s SEO strategies and performance the right way using proper techniques. And, implementing the perfect Magento SEO audit strategies can perfectly take care of this.
Similar to regular SEO audits, Magento SEO audit covers on-page SEO, technical SEO, and link-building strategies.
- On-page SEO audit: In this audit, auditors evaluate content and keywords to identify high-ranking keywords and create relevant meta descriptions for pages.
- Technical SEO audit: This audit assesses website indexability, crawlability, page loading speed, and more. It provides a detailed report showing which web pages are performing well and which ones need improvement.
- Link building: This audit takes care of all the links pointing to your website by comprehensively reviewing their quantity and quality. It also examines your website’s content.
You can use tools like Moz and SEMrush for performing Magento SEO audits.
Also read: 9 must-have Magento SEO extensions
- Magento Code Audit
A Magento Code Audit is a crucial audit that helps in evaluating your Magento eCommerce store’s online performance. In this audit, the auditors initially start with a thorough website checkup that comprehensively reviews your source code. With this approach, you can identify underlying bugs, security breaches, platform inefficiencies, and code violations within your website’s codebase that might negatively impact user experience.
Since the overall performance of your website has a high dependency on the quality and efficiency of your codebase. It is important to perform regular code audits to help keep your website functioning optimally.
Given your website’s sensitive information, security must always be your primary concern. A code audit also excels by ensuring your website is secure, with no data breaches or unauthorized access. Have a look at our comprehensive Magento code audit services to ensure your website is backed with a perfectly optimized and secure codebase.
Furthermore, a code audit can assess the compatibility of custom code and third-party integrations with other Magento components in your online store. This evaluation aids in scaling your store effortlessly with future upgrades and code having compatibility with different browsers, devices, and various screen sizes too.
Thus, in conclusion, we can say that a code audit can identify issues such as security vulnerabilities, performance concerns, code compliance violations, coding errors, bugs, and insufficient code documentation.
You can use popular tools like PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPStan, PHPMD, and Magento Coding Standard for performing Magento code audits.
- Magento Performance Audit
A Magento performance audit assesses the technical and functional aspects of your website. It is used to review the working of your website and the functioning of integrated components. It also helps in identifying the areas of improvement such as the page loading speed, response time, and overall performance of the website, all of which are important to create a seamless user experience.
In addition, a performance audit also checks server performance and the speed at which each page of your website loads. This ensures that the server is powerful and is set up to function optimally and keep your website up and running around the clock. It also assesses third-party services and APIs during the audit to ensure that they function without any delays.
With this audit, you can also make sure that the website’s caching mechanism and CDNs are optimized in such a way that static assets are easily distributed globally. Have you heard about Cache Warmer or cWarmer? It’s a popular cache-warming SAAS tool that can enhance your store performance by ensuring that visitors always see the cached version of the website. Thereby improving loading time and overall performance.
Besides, database performance is reviewed and optimized during this audit to improve search speeds and remove unnecessary data that slows down the website.
Therefore, a performance audit identifies and addresses several issues, such as slow loading time, high memory and CPU usage, errors, bugs, and high database queries.
Utilize popular tools like GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, New Relic, and cWarmer for conducting performance audits.
- Magento Security Audit
Security audits have to be performed regularly to detect and eliminate threats and vulnerabilities on your website. It allows you to review your website infrastructure, technical integrity, codebase, and more. Given that your website stores sensitive information, conducting a routine security audit can aid in protecting your online Magento store against security breaches, unauthorized access, and malicious attacks.
The audit reviews your website’s codebase, including custom code and third-party extensions. This helps in identifying insecure coding practices, potential backdoors, and vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers.
The audit also enables you to assess the authentication and authorization mechanisms of your website. It does this by reviewing the roles and permission to ensure that only authorized persons get access to the sensitive data on your website.
In addition to that, whenever your website handles online transactions, the security of payment processes and integration with payment gateways is thoroughly checked with this auditing process to prevent credit card fraud and data leaks.
Furthermore, this audit also checks whether your Magento installation is up-to-date or not with the latest security patches and updates provided by Magento.
Misconfigurations, weak passwords, open ports, and DDoS vulnerabilities are some of the other issues that can be identified and addressed with the help of a security audit.
Use tools like WPScan, OWASP ZAP, and SecurityHeaders.io for performing accurate security audits.
The Benefits of Magento Website Audit
The overall performance and security of your website directly impact the traffic and conversion rate of your brand. With a Magento website audit, you can create an ambient and secure environment for your customers.
The benefits of Magento website audit are as follows-
- Highly Optimized Performance and User Experience: Regular audits assess various performance factors, such as website speed, responsiveness, and usability. By optimizing these aspects periodically, you can provide a seamless and enjoyable experience for users, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased conversions.
- Improvement in SEO and Search Engine Ranking: Website audits often include SEO evaluations, helping you identify opportunities for improving your website’s search engine visibility. By implementing SEO best practices, you can boost your website’s search engine rankings and easily attract more organic traffic.
- Enhanced Security and Data Protection: An audit helps to identify vulnerabilities and security weaknesses within your Magento website. By addressing these issues promptly, you can safeguard sensitive customer data, prevent potential breaches, and ensure compliance with data protection regulations, increasing customer confidence.
- Identification of Technical Issues: A thorough audit can help in detecting technical issues, broken links, and even coding errors that may affect your website’s functionality. When these issues are resolved quickly, your website will run smoothly and reduce downtime.
- Cost Savings and Resource Optimization: Audits can help identify inefficient resource allocation and unnecessary third-party extensions. By optimizing resource usage, you can reduce operational costs and ensure that your website runs efficiently.
- Preparation for Growth and Scalability: As your business expands, your website’s demands may change. An audit can give you insights into your scalability concerns and help you improve your website’s infrastructure in the right way. With the right auditing tools ensure your store is scalable as your business grows by seamlessly handling increased traffic and transactions.
Final words
In conclusion, every website is unique, and so are its challenges. Get the right Magento audit service partners to help you develop websites at scale. Employing the right Magento website audit provides a holistic evaluation of your online store’s health, helping you identify and address issues. It further aids in improving key aspects and creating a more secure and efficient platform that meets the needs of your customers and your business goals. Magestore has approximately 15 years of experience working with Magento merchants and other Magento service providers. We believe that this article will be helpful for you and give you more insights to grow your business!
