Benefits of an e-commerce audit - how to improve your online shop's performance
An e-commerce audit is like a car inspection, performed regularly it keeps all performance parameters in good shape. The frequency of auditing depends on the individual preferences of your business. Depending on the indicator, a good practice is to review every three to 12 months. Let's talk about audits today.
What is an e-commerce audit and why is it so important?
Right at the outset, I'll demur that today we won't be looking at a source code audit. Such an audit should be carried out at least once, but only if there are established quality rules. If there are none, then post-factum compliance with standards should not be required.
An e-commerce audit can be multidimensional:
- SEO audit
- performance audit
- accessibility audit
- UX audit
Each of these areas is important, as they each contribute a little to the performance of the shop and its effectiveness in selling.
SEO audit
The SEO audit examines the compliance of a website's structure with the guidelines of search engines such as Google. In Google's knowledge base, you can find documentation (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide) that explains which areas of SEO and site structure you need to look into in order to be ranked well.
SEO is not just about ranking in search results. It is also about the display quality of your shop and listing in other search engine services. Issues such as content structure, links, rich snippets, href lang and more. This audit is usually carried out by SEO agencies. It is not only an SEO agency that can examine an online shop's compliance. Companies specialising in implementation can also carry out such an audit.
Performance audit
Core Web Vitals, or CVW for short, seeks to parameterise the customer experience in terms of the speed of the online shop. Customers expect to see the product card, category and homepage as quickly as possible.
The time we wait for pages to appear has a direct impact on the rejection rate. Page loading of more than 3s significantly affects customer satisfaction and, as a result, the decision to leave the site in favour of competitors.
This is why it is so important not to rest on one's laurels, but to continually and methodically screw up the performance results. Anyone can check the results at https://pagespeed.web.dev/. We always get two sets of information, those relating to mobile and desktop. As mobile currently accounts for the majority of traffic, it is presented first.
Once the performance of the shop has been studied, its optimisation is handled by the technical team. The developers with space to work on performance will deliver a significant improvement for the end customer. Worse performance immediately after implementation is not a mistake. It is the natural course of things. Leaving it behind, on the other hand, is a mistake.
Accessibility audit (Accessibility or WCAG)
Not everyone pays attention to accessibility. And that's a shame. Accessibility is not only a nod to people with disabilities and visual, motor and speech impairments. It is first and foremost a set of good practices, the implementation of which can also help you to navigate your shop website more efficiently.
Based on the available documentation of the WCAG standard and online tools that can examine compliance very quickly, even without the involvement of specialists, you will be able to assess how much work there is to be done in this area.
UX audit
A UX audit will give an answer to the question of whether there are elements in your shop that interfere with the natural way customers move around. If something is not in line with established trends, or is heavily distracting to the customer, this is a bad sign. A sign that could lead to a customer not buying.
For such an audit, it is best to hire a company that can design interfaces and examine the compatibility of the design with customer expectations. This is done through research on a test group.
The result of such an audit is usually a list of recommendations and highlighting elements of the online shop that is designed correctly. This way, it is not only clear what to improve, but also what has been well designed from the start.
Summary - audit not so terrible
An audit is not a bad thing. It is a natural thing in organisations that are serious about growth. It's not about knowing everything, it's about having an open mind enough to constantly improve.
By auditing different businesses and online shops, we are constantly learning something new and adding to our offering at Monogo. We work with different suppliers because we are aware that achieving high performance and sales targets leads to our success.