DIY Ecommerce Audit: 10 Free Checks You Can Do in 30 Minutes

A DIY ecommerce audit will not replace a professional one, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. What it will do is find the obvious leaks in about half an hour, for free, using nothing but your phone and your analytics. That is often enough to tell you whether the bigger version is worth paying for.

Run these ten checks in order. Score each one honestly.

The 10 checks

1. The five-second homepage test

Open your homepage on mobile, look at it for five seconds, then look away. Can you state what you sell, who it is for, and what makes it different?

Better: ask someone who has never seen it. You cannot un-know your own business, which is exactly the blind spot this check exists to expose. A pass means a stranger gets all three. A partial means they get one or two.

2. Complete a purchase on your phone

Not a test order through the admin. A real one, on mobile data rather than office wifi, paying with a real card. Go all the way through and count the times you feel friction: a field that will not autofill, a keyboard that covers the button, a coupon box that makes you wonder whether you should hunt for a code.

Most store owners have never done this. It is the single most valuable half hour in the whole list.

3. Does the product page answer every question?

Pick your third best-selling product, not your first. Write down every question a cautious buyer would need answered before paying: dimensions, materials, compatibility, delivery timing, returns, what is in the box.

Now find each answer on the page. Count how many require scrolling past the fold, opening a tab, or leaving for a separate page. Every one of those is a place people give up.

4. Search your own store for your own products

Use your internal search the way a customer would: a partial name, a common misspelling, a category word, a competitor’s term for the same thing.

If a search for something you definitely stock returns nothing, you have found a genuine revenue leak. People who use internal search convert far above average, because they arrive knowing what they want. Failing them is expensive in a way that is invisible in most reports.

5. Count the checkout friction

Go back to checkout and count four specific things: total form fields, clicks from cart to payment, the step at which shipping cost first appears, and whether guest checkout exists.

Baymard Institute puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 studies, and extra costs surfacing at checkout account for 40% of abandonments. If your shipping cost appears after the address step, you have just found the most common expensive problem in ecommerce.

6. Load it on a throttled connection

Run your homepage and a product page through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile numbers, not the desktop ones. Then do the human version: turn off wifi, switch to slow mobile data, and open a product page while counting.

Google and Deloitte’s 2020 study of 30 million mobile sessions found that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile load speed lifted retail conversions by 8.4%. The study is a few years old now, but nothing since has contradicted the direction.

7. Look for trust signals before payment

At the moment a customer types their card number, what reassurance is visible without scrolling? Returns policy, delivery promise, contact details, a real address, payment logos.

First-time buyers are deciding whether you are a real company. Established brands forget this because their repeat customers already know the answer.

8. Check that analytics reconciles with reality

Take last month’s order count from your platform admin and compare it with the transaction count in your analytics. Then compare revenue.

A gap of a few percent is normal. A gap of fifteen percent means every decision you have made from that data was made on fiction. This check takes two minutes and invalidates more assumptions than any other one here. The full version of it is the ecommerce analytics audit.

9. Walk the journey in every market you sell to

If you sell into more than one country, repeat check two for each of them. Currency, tax display, shipping options, payment methods, delivery estimates.

Secondary markets are where broken things live longest, because nobody on the team shops there. A missing local payment method in your second-biggest market is a silent tax on every order you never received.

10. Put a competitor side by side

Open your best competitor’s product page next to yours on the same phone. Not to copy them, but to notice what they answer that you do not.

Then buy something from them if you can afford it. Their checkout, their confirmation email, their delivery experience. Half an hour and the price of one order will teach you more than any competitor analysis document.

Score yourself

Mark each check as pass, partial or fail. Be harsh, because the point is to find problems rather than to feel good.

What a DIY ecommerce audit cannot find

This is the part most checklists leave out, so here it is plainly. Four categories of problem stay invisible no matter how carefully you run the list above.

DIY ecommerce audit versus a professional one

If the scorecard turned up more than you expected, the pillar guide covers what a full ecommerce audit examines, and there is an honest breakdown of what one costs before you talk to anyone.