By reading the word Audit, you may refer to some financial auditing or any industrial auditing. Well, here we have used the word for the same meaning but different references. Auditing refers to the overall financial inspection of your business. The same applies to the website audit in which the overall inspection of your website is done. Your work doesn’t end after just developing an E-commerce website. While undertaking routine E-commerce business management, there is a lot to comprehend and handle after getting acquired in an online business. Even if your site is performing well, you should go for regular auditing of your E-commerce website to understand all the statics properly and to get smooth functioning.
What is a Website Audit?
Website Auditing is a process to examine and review your online business in a professional way. It will help you optimize your site by solving any issues and improving it and will also get you more sales. It includes checking the overall aspects of your E-commerce site like SEO, content, site performance, conversion rate optimization, platform analysis and other important aspects of the business.
Advantages of conducting Shopware E-commerce Website Audit:
Shopware provides many advantages for your E-commerce business. But your work doesn’t end after just developing the fabulous site. You must stay active about the performance of your site because statistics are very important. An Audit lets you understand the numbers and site performance properly so that you can make the required changes to your online store. A website audit will help you with the following things:
- Increased customer experience and customer service.
- Optimized search and filters.
- Abandoned cart management.
- SEO progress report.
- It will let you know the functioning of your website across different browsers.
- You can get a clear idea about the overall working of your website.
How to perform the audit of your Shopware E-commerce store like a pro?
We have already seen how important it is for your E-commerce store to undergo auditing practice. You could possibly miss out on several sales possibilities if you do not perform the auditing process. So, here are some Shopware E-commerce auditing tips and approaches that can significantly improve the performance and conversion rate of your online store:
Let us first understand the Non-technical procedure. In this procedure, you should start inspecting your website by putting yourself in the place of your customers. Prepare the checklist and start asking the following questions to get the result-oriented solutions:
1. Smoothly working site
No matter how good your Shopware E-commerce website is, but just one error will move the customer away. Hence it is always important to maintain an error-free website.
- Check if your website is taking too much time to load and conduct a speed test if required.
- Report on 404 “page not found” errors using Google Analytics and fix any broken links.
- Conduct a customer survey by taking their feedback about your site and asking about the improvements they want.
2. Content Strategy
Effective content is one of the most basic strategies to increase sales because good content engages online users and motivates them to buy your products.
- Check if your content is up-to-date and also correct any grammatical or spelling errors if any.
- Understand the demands of your customers and come up with content that can relate to them.
- Check the frequency of your content creation as consistency is very important to keep your customers engaged.
3. Responsive and mobile-friendly website
There are many different web browsers available in the market like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. So your website must be responsive across all browsers. Also as the usage of the smartphone has increased, the users look for a site that gives a great mobile experience.
- It is very much necessary that your site operates in the same manner across all the browsers. So check for it.
- You must ensure that the user doesn’t have to opt for ‘Desktop site’ while loading your E-commerce site on the mobile.
- Check whether all the product images are clear and that your site is easy to browse from a mobile or a different web browser.
4. Products and categories
One of the major goals of product audits is to correctly examine the website and ensure that customers can easily locate what they are looking for.
- To enhance the categories, make sure they have appealing category descriptions.
- Check whether the search and filter functions are providing proper results.
- Make sure that the product images are clear and the customers can zoom out and zoom in on the images properly.
5. Customer Service
As a store owner, you should concentrate on what your customers’ present demands are, how you are meeting them and how you can improve them. More than half of customers are willing to pay for superior customer service. So it is a very important factor to get more product sales and also to keep your existing customers engaged with your Shopware E-commerce store.
- Review your customer care services and check whether your customer’s query gets resolved on time or not.
- Get the customers feedback and check if they are happy with your customer care service.
Coming to the technical auditing part, it will help you to structure the whole website. You can also use some online tools available such as Xenu, Semrush, ScreamingFrog, Siteliner, etc. to perform the full website auditing for the optimised site.
1. SEO Audit
If your SEO is good, then your E-commerce store’s search engine popularity will rise. It drives traffic and a one-time visitor can become your regular customer if your site is on the top of the search results.
- Examine and update your SEO keywords and also keywords should be popular search terms that are relevant to your content and products.
- You can use the SEO crawler tool to crawl your entire site and identify any issues that are preventing it from being crawled and indexed.
- You can also see if your site is resolving to the domain you want. If it doesn’t, Google will consider all of your site’s instances to be duplicate data, which will impact your site’s potential to rank.
- Check if your site has strong internal and external linking and also redirecting and product linking.
2. Pagespeed
Site speed or pagespeed is an important factor for SEO rankings and your site should be able to perform well during high web traffic.
- Check the speed of your website to discover if any flaws need to be fixed. It would be beneficial if you apply all of the best practices to improve the speed and quality of your web hosting.
- You can use a variety of online tools to measure and optimize your site’s speed, including Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom tools, etc.
3. Conversion Rate Audit
The goal of conversion rate optimization is to increase the percentage of users that complete the desired action.
- Calls to Action (CTA) – The conversion rate will be severely impacted if the CTA is too large, small, or if it is not clickable. For a high conversion rate, you must invest in optimizing the CTA button.
- Checkout – Ensure that the checkout process goes smoothly. A one-step checkout is also an option.
4. Security Audit
Ensuring your site is totally safe is one of the most important components of an E-commerce website audit. If you want visitors to buy from your site, then you must first convince them that your website is reliable and secure.
- You must check whether security patches are applied to your site or not.
- Google marks the non HTTP URLs as “Not Secure”. Hence make sure to migrate your site if your domain is not secure.
- Use an SEO crawler to look for any pages that are not secure.
The Finish Line
In this blog, we have understood the importance of Audit and the procedure to make it happen. We are now clear that an E-commerce website audit is a necessary aspect of your long-term planning. Shopware along with the Auditing procedure can be the right platform for your online store. Hence it is highly recommended that you perform the audit and review of your website to get the report of your business statistics and performance.
Would you like to run a Shopware E-commerce website audit for your online store? iCreative technologies is now an official Shopware partner. Hence we have proficiency in developing effective Shopware E-commerce websites and also performing advanced audits. Get your website’s first security audit for free! Contact us now and we will explain how our Shopware E-commerce audit will help and improve your online business.
Jainesh Shah
Jainesh Shah is a CEO and Co-Founder of iCreative Technologies Inc. iCreative Technologies is a digital eCommerce agency mainly serving B2B clients across the globe. With over 15 years of experience in technology and business, he is helping his client thrive in this competitive era. He is specialized in eCommerce consulting, creative thinking, generating new business ideas, and delivering end products to market in the digital space. He is working with the vision to help his partner agencies and Clients to grow in their respective businesses.