Best Ways to Conduct Your eCommerce Website Audit

Do you want to become a pro at ecommerce website auditing?

You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will review a number of tips that will be helpful for you to be expert at ecommerce auditing.

Why become an expert?

In ecommerce, auditing is the way to analyze the performance of the website and get insights on various current and potential problems. In other words, it absolutely necessary to improve on a continuous basis.

Sounds good enough? If so, let’s begin by discussing some of the tips divided into the areas of the audit.

Usability and speed of the website

In ecommerce business, website performance is a critical part of UI. Most Internet users expect a fast browsing experience, so disappointing websites are usually closed. In fact, 30 percent of Internet users surveyed by Kissmetrics claimed they would wait 6 seconds for a site to load before engagement.

More food for thought: 79 percent of online shoppers are less likely to buy from a site that performs poorly.

Audit to the rescue!

To perform it like a pro, you need to concentrate your effort on two areas:

• Speed. Test the site for speed as long as you can and analyze every issue that occurs. Don’t undervalue the importance of investing into speed improvement.
• Possible failures during traffic spikes. A website may perform well in case of low or moderate traffic but crash completely if the volume increases. Develop a plan for a worst-case scenario to avoid losing customers.

Content strategy

An interesting and helpful content can go a long way in bringing more traffic to an ecommerce site. Here are the things to check out to ensure that your content is engaging and inspires to buy.

• Regardless of the nature of products you’re selling, you have to ensure that your content is updated and meets the needs of target groups. Your customers might have different concerns throughout the year, have you aligned their needs and your content?
• Is your ecommerce blog productive? Analyze whether the blog provides sufficient amount of information for different target groups. Eliminate uninteresting and repetitive content right away. Ask yourself a question: does your content help to solve issues of customers?

Imagery

Visual aids are important and you know that. A pro ecommerce auditor pays close attention to them as well. Check the following:

• Image optimization. Every image on the site should be optimized with image alt tags. This is easily done in most popular CMS.
• Product images. Does the site use overblown images or original ones? If overblown is the answer, then we’ve got a problem: viewers are alienated with them. Recommend to change them to inspiring ones that help to imagine the products or services sold on the website.

Product organization

An effective ecommerce website is always easy to navigate and find necessary products. Does the website you’re auditing fall in this category as well? Here are ways to determine this.

• Are menus and product categories optimized? Does the website have an overly complex menu structure? Making everything optimized and easy as possible to navigate is the goal here.
• See that you can learn from usability tests, search function, frontend and backend of the website. Keep customer experience in mind.

Customer journey

Why not ask visitors what they think of the usability of the website? After all, it was created for them. Customer surveys and studies are typically used to reveal customers’ opinion.

• The site needs to have a user-friendly journey that makes it easy to land on a special page and complete a purchase. Check for that.
• Were there any complaints about site usability? Feel free to ask customer service team members.
• Don’t forget to analyze the pricing strategies and most popular products to determine the most effective website strategy.
• Ensure that customer chat, FAQs, and other service-related functions are in place and accessible.

Ecommerce website tools

SE Ranking Website Audit – a comprehensive tool for website audit that identifies errors quickly. It has more than 70 functions, such as Images and Links Analysis, Pages, Content, Meta, Usability, and others.

Assignmenthelper – content is king. This tool is great for checking whether website content is suitable, inspiring, and attracting for target groups.

Marketing Grader – one of the easiest website audit tools out there. Developed by Hubspot, Marketing Grader is suitable for checking websites, mobile websites, social media, and blogs.

WooRank – both small businesses and large stores will find WooRank useful because of the wide range of functions it has. They include custom audits, export of result in PDF, email audit, key phrase analysis, amount of data, screenshots, and more.

What’s next?

An effective website audit is a right strategy that will pay good dividends in the future. Don’t underestimate the importance of conducting the audit, it’s your way to find website issues and eliminate them!