Savva Field guide
How to audit a Shopify store — the full checklist (2026)
Your dashboard shows the sales you made. An audit shows the sales you're losing. Here's the complete five-area checklist we run on our own store — with the exact places to look in your admin.
Honest framing first: an audit doesn't make money — it finds where money is already leaking. When we audited our own store (a UK wellness brand we run), the first pass found three leaks in four minutes: sold-out bundle variants funnelling everyone to the cheapest option, a public discount code eating about a third of gross margin, and a cost-per-item of 0.00 — which meant no report anywhere showed real profit. All three had been live for weeks. That's what an audit is for.
Area 1 — Money: where margin leaks first
Start here because these problems compound on every single order.
- Cost per item is filled in on every product (Products → each variant). If it's blank or 0.00, every profit report you have is fiction. This is the most common failure we see.
- Audit your active discount codes (Discounts). For each one: who can find it, does it stack, and what does it leave of your margin? Coupon-aggregator sites index public codes within days. A code is a unit-economics decision, not a marketing vibe.
- Recalculate one real order by hand: price − product cost − shipping − payment fee (~2.9% + 30¢) − any app fees − ad cost to get that order. If you've never done this, the result is usually a surprise — sometimes a negative one.
- Check your app subscriptions (Settings → Billing). Stores accumulate $150–750/mo of apps; cancel what you haven't opened in a month.
Area 2 — Conversion: can people actually buy?
- Every variant purchasable. Filter products by inventory. A sold-out 2-pack doesn't just lose the 2-pack sale — it silently reroutes buyers to your cheapest option (this exact bug cost our store its bundle revenue).
- Place a test order on your phone, start to finish. Count taps, watch for surprise costs at checkout — surprise shipping is the #1 stated reason for cart abandonment.
- Product page basics: benefit-led description (not the supplier's spec sheet), visible reviews or an honest absence of them, shipping and returns answered on the page — not hidden in a policy link.
- Guest checkout on, express wallets on (Shop Pay / PayPal / Apple Pay). Forced account creation kills mobile checkouts.
Area 3 — SEO: are you invisible?
Sample your 10 best-selling products and check each against the basics: unique title and meta description, a description that isn't the supplier's copy-paste, alt text on images. Then confirm Google Search Console is connected and your sitemap submitted. The full priority list is in our Shopify SEO checklist — for the audit, you just need to know how far you are from it.
Area 4 — Competitors: your prices don't exist in a vacuum
- Find 3 stores selling your product or category and note their price, shipping offer and guarantee next to yours. Buyers see this comparison even when you don't.
- Check their active ads in Meta's Ad Library (it's public and free). An ad that has run for months is an ad that pays — study its angle.
- Note what they answer on the product page that you don't. Objection coverage is copyable; copy it in your own words.
Area 5 — Technical health
- Speed: run PageSpeed Insights on your home page and a product page, mobile tab. Under ~2 seconds usable is the bar; every extra second costs roughly 7% of conversions. Uninstalled-but-lingering app scripts are the usual culprit.
- Broken links: click every menu item and footer link. Deleted a product? It needs a 301 redirect (Online Store → Navigation → URL redirects), not a 404.
- Mobile layout: your traffic is 70–80% phones; audit on a phone, not your desktop.
The honest bottom line: none of this is hard — it's relentless. The leaks come back: variants sell out again, codes leak again, apps pile up again. An audit isn't a one-time project, it's a habit. Do it weekly, or have something do it for you weekly.
Want this exact audit run for you — free?
Savva runs all five areas on your storefront in about a minute — every finding tied to the money it's costing you. No store access needed for the first pass, no card. It's the same audit we run on our own store.
Run a free auditCommon questions
How often should I audit my Shopify store?
A light 30-minute pass weekly, a full audit monthly. Stores drift constantly — variants sell out, codes leak, apps pile up. Weekly catches problems while they're cheap.
What should a Shopify store audit include?
Five areas: money (costs, discounts, fees), conversion (product pages, checkout), SEO, competitors, and technical health. Most free "audit tools" check only one of the five.
How long does a Shopify store audit take?
A thorough first manual audit: 3–5 hours. The weekly maintenance pass: about 30 minutes once you know where to look. Automated audits find in minutes what takes hours by hand — but you should understand what they're checking.
Can I audit a Shopify store for free?
Yes — everything here uses your Shopify admin, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, all free. Some AI tools (including ours) run the full audit free as a starting point; the paid part is having the fixes done for you.