Magento is a popular eCommerce platform developed by Adobe. Thousands of sellers across eBay, Amazon, and other marketplaces utilize it to create, manage, and scale their online stores.
Under the hood, Magento is an open-source software with thousands of third-party modules and extensions. To operate it efficiently, you need regular audits and diligent action planning.
Audits help effectively overcome most problems by revealing them early. They also help to achieve progress by leveraging hidden development opportunities.
With Magento website audits, you can maintain efficiency and obtain maximum marketing results, such as organic traffic acquisition, UX/UI excellence, boosting conversions, and growing sales.
In today’s post, we’ll tell you how to achieve all these by running a systemic Magento site audit, covering several key aspects:
- Website performance
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Security
- User experience (UX).
Aspect 1: Performance Audit
Did you know? The average attention span on social media these days is only 3 seconds! People are overloaded with information, indeed.
In a sense, they’re spoiled by the abundance of propositions, unwilling to spend more than a few seconds reviewing photos and videos, to say nothing of the textual ads.
Marketplace sellers fight for visitors’ attention, and in doing so, they prioritize their website performance above all. That’s exactly why we put the performance audit first on our list.
When auditing your Magento website for performance, focus on these aspects.
Measure website speed
Customers in 2025 are used to websites opening in the blink of an eye, flattering with their self-complacency from buying excessively powerful smartphones.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Magento Performance Audit to evaluate your Magento website’s loading time. Aim for a load time of under 3 seconds, as faster pages will capture more customers, and your sales will go up.
A critically important metric is the Time to First Byte (TTFB), which evaluates your Magento site’s responsiveness. If you discover a high TTFB on your site, here are a few suggestions on how to improve it:
- Optimize server configurations and reduce latency.
- Minimize the number of HTTP requests.
- Leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content.
Identify unoptimized images
Images are the biggest contributors to online store’s sluggishness and the biggest attention-grabbing magnets. So, to marry these two qualities, your Magento 2 technical audit should focus on evaluating images.
For example, your audit can reveal that your images are overly big, in high resolution, and unoptimized formats.
Convert such images to modern formats like WebP, which are smaller and load faster. Additionally, implement lazy loading so images only load as users scroll through your pages.
Run stress tests
Even if your website demonstrated great results in the initial speed and image optimization testing, that doesn’t mean it can handle peak loading times. Those usually happen during seasonal shopping spikes, mostly on holidays and red-letter days.
Tools like Loader.io, BlazeMeter can help you simulate peak loading times and identify potential optimization bottlenecks:
- Slow database queries
- Overloaded server resources
- Poorly optimized third-party extensions
With proper stress testing and optimization, you won’t lose customers and money during peak shopping times.
Aspect 2: SEO Audit
Marketplaces are essentially commercial-focused search engines. They allow customers to search for various items inside their vast directories.
Therefore, auditing a website’s search engine performance and using findings to fuel SEO growth is absolutely essential for a successful Magento website operation.
Check metadata, keyword usage, and off-page optimization
Run a comprehensive SEO audit of your website’s metadata, keyword usage, as well as off-page and on-page optimization. Pay close attention to the HTML code behind your metadata to ensure it’s correctly structured for better UX.
Here is a short overview of two common issues you are likely to find and how to fix them:
- Poor backlink profile health, i.e., only a few authoritative domains point toward your Magento website.
- How to fix it? Check various backlink bundles from trustworthy link-building services to quickly boost the authority of your store.
- Ineffective keyword targeting, i.e., lack of high-performing or relevant keywords that lead to missed ranking opportunities and reduced organic traffic.
- How to fix it? Analyze and optimize meta titles, descriptions, and headers with targeted keywords, including long-tail keywords.
Identify search engine crawl errors
Your Magento SEO audit may reveal crawl errors, such as notorious 404 and 500 errors, redirect chains, and DNS errors. Such errors will prevent external (e.g., Google) or internal marketplace search engines from indexing your shop pages.
To effectively fix crawl errors, update and maintain your robots.txt file to ensure all critical pages, such as landing pages and pages with key offers, are crawlable.
Additionally, ensure your Magento website has an efficient schema markup — a structured data code format added to your website to boost its search engine visibility.
Analyze the internal linking structure
Your internal links also help search engines index your pages, but their main role is the distribution of link equity effectively across your domain. This aids user experience, affecting various UX aspects such as ease of navigation.
You can use tools like Screaming Frog to audit internal link distribution. To address the internal linking discovered, follow these simple guidelines:
- Ensure your key pages are easily accessible with contextual links.
- Avoid “orphan” pages by linking them to related content.
- Use descriptive anchor text to help search engines “understand” your pages better.
When optimizing the internal linking structure, you may consider using either relative or absolute URLs; however, mixing these two formats is not advisable.
Aspect 3: Security Audit
Is your website properly protected from malicious software and scammer attacks? Security should be taken seriously, as a single incident can cost you money, undermine customers’ trust, and lead to a loss of reputation.
A scrupulous Magento security audit can help you identify vulnerabilities and potential security breaches.
Run regular vulnerability scans
With security, you need to be several steps ahead of potential intruders. Only regular security scans can help you find and fix website vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
A few best practices will help you get started:
- Use tools like Magento Security Scan Tool or Qualys to detect vulnerabilities.
- Schedule regular scans (e.g., every week) to detect problems in time.
- Meticulously review scan reports and patch vulnerabilities (e.g., outdated software, weak passwords, or misconfigured settings) to maintain a secure environment.
Keep all patches and extensions up-to-date
Outdated and ineffective security software can compromise the confidentiality of your customers’ information and the security of your website. Therefore, your goal is to keep all software updated at all times.
This includes:
- Regularly checking for security patches released by Magento.
- Updating third-party extensions.
- Removing unused or unsupported extensions to reduce vulnerabilities.
Magento framework runs on open-source software, which consists of different third-party modules and plenty of extensions. Regularly updating these extensions is your responsibility.
Run penetration tests
This auditing technique is also called “ethical hacking,” i.e., you hire or ask an in-house hacker to try to break your website security. The results of their work help to identify and fix exploitable security holes.
The following best practices can help:
- Test areas such as login forms, payment gateways, and user data storage.
- Study findings and prioritize fixing critical vulnerabilities.
- Repeat tests periodically to ensure ongoing protection.
Aspect 4: UX and Mobile Responsiveness
Modern customers are spoiled with hyper-fast mobile internet connections and flawless application performance. That’s why checking your Magento website for mobile responsiveness and impeccable UX performance is critically important.
Evaluate navigation structure and mobile page speed
Firstly, evaluate your website’s navigation structure and mobile page speed for seamless user experiences. Even the slightest glitch in mobile speed can scare potential customers away.
Follow these best practices:
- Check navigation menus to be simple, logical, and accessible on all devices.
- Ensure critical content loads first for better user engagement.
- Test website page speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Prevent intrusive elements (e.g., full-screen pop-ups) that hinder navigation.
- Compress large files and optimize images to improve load times.
Conduct heatmap analysis to understand user behavior on key pages
Heatmaps are a highly effective way to display user behavior on your website. They help to identify pain points and bottlenecks that hinder UX on web and mobile devices altogether.
- Identify areas where users hesitate or fail to engage and simplify navigation.
- Evaluate the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment rates.
- Focus on high-traffic pages like landing and product pages.
- Use tools like Google Analytics to correlate heatmap insights with performance metrics.
Review customer feedback
Customer feedback monitoring is another vital aspect of your Magento site audit. It helps to identify UX pain points and engage customers with constructive discussions and genuine empathy.
Here is how to leverage customer feedback effectively:
- Monitor diverse feedback sources, e.g., reviews, testimonials, and forums.
- Utilize tools like Hotjar to conduct regular surveys.
- Follow-up with customers via email and other channels.
Don’t forget about social media insights. Maintaining and monitoring your brand’s social media pages will yield plenty of insights into real-life product usage, customer concerns, and preferences.
Conclusion
Auditing your Magento website should be a recursive process. Note that e-commerce is a highly dynamic environment where user preferences, competitor offerings, and security threats may change overnight.
Under these conditions, only regular audits can provide timely and up-to-date data and insights into Magento performance and user behavior.
However, informing all the stakeholders of the findings and celebrating the strengths won’t lead you anywhere. It is no less important to act upon the findings, develop and implement action plans, and monitor their execution.
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