The traffic is there. Ads are running, emails go out, people click. The orders just aren't keeping up. When a client tells me that, I almost never find one big problem. I find six or seven small ones stacked on top of each other.
An audit is how you find them. This is the same 10-point list I work through when I review a Shopify store. You can do it yourself in an afternoon. Keep a running doc open, write down everything that bugs you, and don't fix anything until you've finished the whole pass.
Before You Start: Shop Your Own Store
Grab your phone. Not your laptop, your phone, because that's where most of your shoppers are. Search for a product, add it to the cart and go all the way to the payment step. Then do the same thing on a desktop browser.
One tip: use a private browsing window so you see what a new visitor sees, with no saved login and no cached pages. Most of what you need to find will show up in those two trips.
The 10-Point Shopify Store Audit Checklist
1. Site Speed
Slow pages lose people before they ever see a product. Run your homepage, one collection page and your best-selling product page through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool, and look at the mobile tab first. The usual suspects are huge images, a homepage video or slider, and apps loading scripts on every page. A mistake I see constantly: someone uninstalls an app, but its code is still sitting in the theme. Check your theme files or ask your developer to clean it out.
2. Mobile Experience
Every button should be easy to hit with your thumb. Text should be readable without pinching to zoom, and any pop-up needs a close button you can actually hit. On product pages, "Add to cart" should be visible without a lot of scrolling. If an email sign-up pop-up fires the second someone lands, I'd delay it or turn it off on mobile.
3. A Clear Value Proposition
A new visitor should know what you sell, who it's for and why you within a few seconds of landing. Pretty hero image with a vague headline? Rewrite the headline. Plain beats clever here.
4. Navigation and Search
Shoppers should reach what they want in two or three clicks. In Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Navigation and look hard at your main menu. Short and boring is good. Use the category names your customers would use, not your internal ones.
Then test your store search with real words, including misspellings. If searches come up empty, Shopify's free Search & Discovery app lets you add synonyms so "sweater" also finds "knit."
5. Product Photography
People can't pick your product up, so the photos carry the sale. Keep lighting and backgrounds consistent. Show several angles. Include at least one shot that shows scale or the product in use. That last one gets skipped all the time.
6. Product Descriptions
Lead with why someone would want it. Then give them what they need to decide: sizing, materials, dimensions, care, what's in the box. Long paragraphs are hard to read on a phone, so break them up or use bullets.
7. Trust Signals
A first-time visitor has to trust you with their card. Your contact info, shipping policy and returns policy should be one click away from any page. Show the payment methods you accept. And check your footer. Old copyright years and dead social links look like nobody's minding the shop.
8. Pricing and Shipping Transparency
Surprise costs at checkout drive people away. In Baymard Institute's cart abandonment research, which averages 50 studies to a documented abandonment rate of 70.22%, the top reason US shoppers gave for abandoning an order (excluding those who were "just browsing") was extra costs such as shipping, taxes and fees being too high, at 40%.
So tell people early. Put your shipping cost or free-shipping threshold on product pages and in the cart. Don't save it for the last step.
9. Checkout Friction
The same Baymard research found 18% of shoppers abandoned because the site wanted them to create an account, and 17% because the checkout was too long or complicated. This is where I'd look first on almost any store. In Shopify admin, open Settings > Checkout and Settings > Customer accounts, then confirm:
- Guest checkout works. Offer an account, don't require one.
- Express options like Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal are on, if your customers use them (you'll find these under Settings > Payments)
- Only the fields you truly need are required
- The discount code box works and doesn't send people off to a coupon site
- Your shipping and returns policies are linked in checkout
10. Abandoned Cart Follow-Up
Some people will leave no matter what you do. Make sure Shopify's abandoned checkout email is actually on. On newer stores you'll find it in the Marketing section of admin; on older setups, check Settings > Notifications. Rewrite the default copy so it sounds like you, show a clear image of what they left, and give them one link back to their cart.
How to Prioritize What You Find
By now you probably have a long list. Please don't try to fix it all this week. I sort everything into three buckets:
- This week: anything broken, confusing or blocking checkout
- This month: speed fixes, product page updates, clearer shipping messages
- Later: the big stuff, like a new theme, new photography or a full navigation rebuild, which needs a plan and a budget
Start where the traffic is. Usually that means your homepage, your best-selling product pages and your cart (Analytics > Reports in Shopify will show you your top landing pages). A small fix on a page thousands of people see beats a big fix on a page almost nobody visits.
If you want to look beyond the store itself, my post on website tips for small businesses pairs well with this checklist.
When to Bring In a Second Set of Eyes
Auditing your own store is hard. You know where everything is, so you don't notice what trips up a stranger. That's the honest reason outside reviews work.
At Ellise Luxxe Consulting®, I do eCommerce store audits for Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Squarespace stores. The Core audit covers your homepage, top product pages and checkout, and you get a written fix list in priority order. The Full audit covers the whole site and adds a walkthrough call where we go through the findings together. You can see what's in each on the pricing section of my services page.
Let's Look at Your Store Together
I've spent 13+ years in Fortune 500 eCommerce, and I still enjoy walking a store with the person who built it. If you'd like a hand, book a free strategy call. We'll go through where your store stands and pick the fixes worth doing first.