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Website Audit Checklist
A technical health pass on an eCommerce site: what can be crawled, what is indexed, how fast it renders, whether the markup is right and whether the measurement can be trusted. This is the site-level layer. If you want the commercial layer — margin, channels, retention — that is the growth assessment instead.
CHECKS
42 checks
TIME TO RUN
Half a day with a crawler
LAST UPDATED
September 2026
LEVEL
Technical marketer or developer
Site health is a precondition, not a strategy. Clearing it does not grow revenue; failing it caps everything else.
- Scope
What this covers, and what it deliberately does not
There are two different things people mean by an audit. This is the technical one.
This checklist answers a narrow question: is the site technically sound enough that marketing effort is not being wasted? Crawlability, indexation, speed, redirects, markup, accessibility and whether analytics tells the truth.
It does not tell you what to do next. A site can pass every check here and still be unprofitable, because margin, channel mix, retention and pricing are not technical questions. That is what the growth assessment covers — twelve checks across six disciplines with published thresholds, aimed at finding your binding constraint rather than your technical debt.
- This checklist: is the site technically sound?
- The growth assessment: what is holding revenue back?
- Run this one first if the site is old, migrated or unmaintained
SECTION 01
7 checks
Crawlability
Whether search engines can reach what you want them to reach, and are not spending their time on what you do not.
Fetch robots.txt on the live domain and read every line
Not the setting in your admin — the file the server actually returns. Disallow rules survive redesigns and outlive the person who added them.
Crawl the full site with JavaScript rendering enabled
Then crawl again with it disabled and compare. Content that disappears may never be indexed.
Confirm the XML sitemap is present, current and contains only indexable URLs
A sitemap listing redirected or noindexed pages wastes crawl budget and signals neglect.
Check crawl depth: nothing important more than three clicks from the homepage
Depth correlates with crawl frequency. Pages buried five levels down get visited rarely.
Identify orphan pages with no internal links
Compare your sitemap against your crawl. Anything in one and not the other is effectively invisible.
Review parameter handling for filters, sorting and internal search
Faceted navigation can generate millions of URLs from a few hundred products. This is the most common source of crawl waste on an eCommerce site.
Check server response times under crawl load
A site that slows to a crawl when crawled will be crawled less. Watch the response time distribution, not the average.
SECTION 02
7 checks
Indexation
What is actually in the index, versus what you intended. The gap between those two numbers is usually the finding.
Compare indexed page count against the pages you intend to rank
More than about 20% above is bloat; well below suggests a blocking or quality problem.
Review every Search Console exclusion reason, not just the totals
Crawled but not indexed, discovered but not crawled, and duplicate without canonical each mean different things and need different fixes.
Confirm every page self-canonicalises unless it deliberately should not
Cross-domain canonicals, canonicals to the homepage and canonical chains are all silent killers.
Check for pages that are both noindexed and in the sitemap
A direct contradiction, and a common one after a migration or a plugin change.
Find duplicate or near-duplicate content across templates
Supplier descriptions, near-identical category pages and printer-friendly variants all qualify.
Verify pagination is indexable and self-canonical
Page two canonicalising to page one hides everything that only appears deeper in the list.
Confirm staging, development and CDN subdomains are not indexable
A crawlable duplicate of your site is competing with you using your own content.
SECTION 03
7 checks
Performance
Measured on the devices and templates your traffic actually uses, from field data rather than a lab score.
Field data over 28 days, on the template with the most sessions. A homepage lab score proves nothing.
Measure Largest Contentful Paint on mobile for your top three templates
Under 2.5 seconds is Google’s published boundary for good. Collection and product pages matter more than the homepage.
Check Interaction to Next Paint, particularly on filter and variant controls
Heavy JavaScript on faceted navigation is where eCommerce sites fail this metric.
Confirm Cumulative Layout Shift is under 0.1 on product and checkout pages
Late-loading banners and review widgets shifting a buy button is a conversion problem before it is a metric.
Audit third-party scripts and remove anything unused
Chat, reviews, popups, heatmaps, tag managers. Most sites carry several nobody has opened in a year.
Confirm images are compressed, correctly sized and lazily loaded below the fold
Serving a 2000px image into a 400px slot is the most common single performance defect there is.
Check caching headers and CDN coverage for static assets
Cheap, invisible and frequently misconfigured after a platform change.
Test on a mid-range Android over a throttled connection
Your newest phone on office wifi is not your traffic, and it will hide everything in this section.
SECTION 04
7 checks
Links, redirects and errors
The accumulated debt of every site change anyone has ever made. Most sites have never looked at this properly.
List every internal link returning a 404 and fix at source
Redirecting a broken internal link is treating the symptom. Fix the link, then redirect the URL for external traffic.
Find and collapse redirect chains to a single hop
Chains accumulate across redesigns. Each hop loses a little and slows the crawl.
Check for redirect loops
Rare, fatal, and invisible until somebody complains that a page will not load.
Confirm 404s return an actual 404 status, not a 200
A soft 404 — a not-found page returning 200 — means search engines index your error page and link checkers report everything as healthy. It is the reason a dead link can hide for months.
Review the 404 page itself for a route back into the catalogue
Search, popular categories and a way to the homepage. You will always have some 404s; what matters is whether they lose the visitor.
Audit external outbound links for dead destinations
Linking to sites that no longer exist is a quality signal and an embarrassment in equal measure.
Confirm HTTPS is enforced sitewide with no mixed content
One insecure asset on a checkout page produces a browser warning at the worst possible moment.
SECTION 05
7 checks
Markup and accessibility
Whether the page is structured so that both search engines and assistive technology can read it. These overlap far more than most teams assume.
Confirm exactly one H1 per page, containing the page subject
Themes that put the logo in the H1 quietly demote every page on the site. Check the rendered source, not the design.
Check heading hierarchy does not skip levels
An H2 followed by an H4 is confusing to a screen reader and to a parser. It is also trivial to fix.
Validate Product, Breadcrumb and Organization structured data on rendered pages
Test the live output. Theme documentation describes intent rather than reality.
Confirm every meaningful image has descriptive alt text and decorative images have empty alt
Both matter. A logo inside a link with empty alt leaves that link with no accessible name at all.
Check colour contrast on body text, buttons and form labels
Fails most often on muted grey helper text and on button states nobody designed.
Navigate the checkout using only a keyboard
If you cannot complete a purchase without a mouse, a portion of your customers cannot buy from you at all.
Confirm form inputs have associated labels and visible focus states
Placeholder text is not a label, and removing focus outlines for aesthetics breaks keyboard navigation entirely.
SECTION 06
7 checks
Measurement integrity
The section that determines whether anything else you measure can be believed. Run it first if you have never checked.
Reconcile analytics revenue against platform revenue for the last full month
Within about 5% is acceptable. Outside that, every downstream number is measured against something that is not real.
Confirm the analytics tag fires once per page, not two or three times
Duplicate tags inflate sessions and destroy conversion rate. Common after a migration or a tag manager change.
Check transactions are not being double-counted on the confirmation page
A refresh-triggered duplicate purchase event is one of the most common measurement faults on an eCommerce site.
Verify internal traffic and known bots are excluded
Your own team browsing the site can be a measurable share of sessions on a smaller store.
Confirm consent configuration is not silently dropping most of your data
A misconfigured banner can lose the majority of measurement, and the loss looks exactly like a traffic decline.
Check Search Console and analytics are both connected and retaining data
Free, and repeatedly discovered missing on sites that have changed hands or agencies.
Record the current state of every metric before you fix anything
Without a baseline, none of the work you are about to do can be shown to have helped.
- Getting it wrong
Six ways a technical audit misleads
Mostly by producing a long list that nobody can act on, or a short list that is wrong.
Reporting by severity score instead of revenue impact
A crawler grades every issue the same way on every site. Forty red items sorted by tool severity is not a plan, and the first item is rarely the one that matters.
Trusting HTTP status over reality
A soft 404 returns 200. Any link checker that trusts status codes will pass a dead page forever — which is exactly how internal links to pages that never existed survive for months.
Using lab scores for performance
A lab test on one page from one location is a diagnostic, not a measurement. Field data over 28 days is what search engines use and what your customers experience.
Auditing the homepage
It is the least representative page on the site. Audit the templates that carry sessions: collection and product.
Auditing before checking measurement
If analytics does not reconcile, every prioritisation decision after that is made on invented numbers. Do the measurement section first.
Treating a clean audit as a growth plan
Technical health is a precondition. Passing every check here does not make a store profitable — it only removes the excuses.
If the result is a list of forty items, the audit has not finished. Rank them, pick one, and be able to say what metric it moves.
- Sequencing
What to fix first
Ordered by consequence, not by how alarming the crawler made it look.
Order
What
Why here
Typical effort
First
Measurement integrity
Everything downstream is judged against these numbers. Fixing analytics before anything else is the only way the rest of the list can be prioritised honestly.
A day
Second
Crawl waste and indexation
Facets, tags, internal search and staging duplicates. Usually configuration rather than development, and it changes what every other report shows.
One to three days
Third
Broken links, chains and soft 404s
Cheap, mechanical, and it recovers signal that already exists rather than building new.
Two to five days
Fourth
Performance on the templates that carry traffic
Needs development and staging. Worth more than it looks, because it is both a ranking factor and a conversion one.
One to two weeks
Fifth
Markup and accessibility
Real obligations and real signals, but rarely the binding constraint. Schedule properly rather than squeezing in.
Ongoing
Nothing on this list grows revenue by itself. It removes ceilings, which is why it belongs before a growth programme rather than instead of one.
- What next
Where to go from here
01
SITE IS CLEAN
Technical health rules out one set of causes. The growth assessment covers the other five disciplines, with published thresholds.
02
SEARCH IS THE PROBLEM
Indexation and architecture fixed, but demand still not captured? That is a content and category question rather than a technical one.
03
AFTER A MIGRATION
Post-migration losses are almost always redirect gaps. Work through that checklist against your pre-migration crawl.
04
WANT IT RUN PROPERLY
Five working days, six disciplines, ranked by revenue impact rather than severity score, with a ninety-day sequence.
- Questions
Website audit FAQs
How often should I run a technical audit?
Quarterly for an actively developed store, and immediately after any migration, redesign, theme update or platform change. Sites do not decay steadily — they decay in steps, and the steps are deployments.
What is the difference between this and the growth assessment?
This checks whether the site is technically sound. The growth assessment checks what is holding revenue back across six disciplines, including margin, channels and retention. A site can pass this completely and still be unprofitable.
Do I need paid tools?
A crawler that renders JavaScript is the only thing worth paying for, and most have a free tier that covers a small store. Everything else — Search Console, field performance data, analytics — is free.
What is a soft 404 and why does it matter?
A page that does not exist but returns a 200 status instead of 404. Search engines may index your error page, and any link checker that trusts status codes will report the link as healthy. It is why dead internal links survive for months unnoticed.
Should I fix everything the crawler flags?
No. Crawlers grade every issue identically on every site and produce lists nobody can action. Rank by revenue impact against effort, fix the top item, then re-run. The sequencing table above is the order we use.
Is accessibility really part of a technical audit?
Yes, on two grounds. It is a legal requirement in a growing number of markets, and it overlaps heavily with the structural markup search engines read. Heading hierarchy, alt text and focus states serve both.
My site passed but traffic is still falling — what now?
Then the cause is not technical. Check whether demand in your category has moved, whether the category layer covers what people search, and whether a competitor has changed. The growth assessment is built for exactly that question.
- Keep going
Related reading
FRAMEWORK
Twelve checks across six disciplines with published thresholds — the commercial layer this checklist deliberately leaves out.
CHECKLIST
Where to go once the site is technically sound but search demand is still not being captured.
FREE AUDIT
Five working days, ranked by revenue impact rather than severity score, with a ninety-day sequence.
Forty findings and no idea which one matters?
That is the normal output of a crawler and the reason our audit ranks instead of scores. Five working days, six disciplines, one constraint.