Shopify store audit: 8 checks to run in one afternoon

What's on a Shopify store audit checklist?

Eight checks, in the order a shopper meets your store, then your app bill.

Before you start: are your visits from real shoppers?

Shopify's session reports now leave out the bots it can identify, and it can't identify them all. Shopify says it would rather miss a few than count a real customer as one, so a new store with daily visits and no carts may still be seeing bots. Read the last 30 days, and don't set them against any day before 24 September 2026: Shopify changed how it counts sessions just before then, as the Shopify CRO guide explains, so older days won't compare.

Most reports below sit under Analytics, then Reports. For the session and search ones, pick Behavior in the Category filter.

Check 1: which pages do your shoppers land on?

Open "Sessions by landing page", the list of pages where visits start, and open the top five on your phone. Then read the performance summary at the top of your Themes page, under Online Store, which rates three speed measures from real visits as Good, Moderate or Poor. If a rating reads Poor, see how to improve Shopify store speed. One fail is easy to miss: an old link in an ad, your bio or an email that opens your error page.

Fix it with the CRO guide's landing page fixes, Shopify banner sizes and URL redirects.

Check 2: does search find what shoppers type?

On your phone, run five searches in your own store: a best seller spelled wrong, its plural, a color plus a product type, a SKU, and the word a shopper uses where your titles use another. Then open "Searches with no results" and "Searches with no clicks".

A typo that finds nothing fails, and so does a term that stays on the no-results list week after week. A term with results and no clicks usually means the results miss what the shopper meant.

Both reports lag by up to 72 hours. Sidekick, the assistant in your admin, can't answer questions about your search data. If an app runs your store search, Shopify's reports can miss those searches, so read the app's own report.

Fix it with the CRO guide's search fixes, how to fix zero-result searches and searchandising.

Check 3: do your collections show what sells?

Take your three most visited collections, the three highest on check 1's list.

1. Open each one on your phone from your store's menu, as a shopper would.
2. Read the first screen before you scroll. A sold-out product or last season's hit up there is a fail.
3. Pick two filters together, such as a size and a color, and check that products are left.
4. Scroll down and note the page your best sellers first appear on. Page 3 is too far.

Two filters that end on an empty page turn away a shopper who had already narrowed the choice down. A long collection with no filters at all fails too.

Fix it with the CRO guide's collection fixes, sorting sold-out products to the bottom, the product listing page, Shopify pagination and visual merchandising.

Check 4: are your best-selling product pages missing anything?

Open "Total sales by product" and look at the top three on your phone. Then open "Items bought together", the product pairs that most often share an order. Two results fail: a top seller whose page is thinner than the rest, with one photo and no reviews, and a pair that sells together often while neither page offers both.

Compare a thin page with the seven parts of a product detail page to see what it lacks. The CRO guide's product page fixes cover shipping, returns and reviews. To offer that pair, see how to upsell on Shopify and order bumps.

Check 5: does the cart show the full price?

Add two products on your phone, open the cart, change a quantity and try a discount code. The cart fails when shipping reads "calculated at checkout" with no free-shipping minimum in view, when wallet buttons such as Shop Pay or Apple Pay are missing, or when there's no box for the code.

Fix it with the CRO guide's cart section, a free shipping bar and a discount code box in the cart.

Check 6: can a shopper actually pay?

Say yesterday brought 500 visits, 30 carts and 20 checkouts, and no sale. Place a test order first: it costs nothing, needs a paid plan and never shows in your reports. Then open Orders, then Abandoned checkouts, and read the "Timeline", the log of what happened, on three of them.

A failed payment in the Timeline is a fail. So is a run of checkouts with no payment attempt, though a few of those can be bots.

For the full run-through, see how to test your store before Black Friday and the CRO guide's checkout section.

Check 7: which reports show where shoppers leave?

Open "Conversion rate breakdown", switch "Open Funnel" off so it follows shoppers step by step, and start with the step that has the biggest drop. The CRO guide shows how to read it.

Then open "Sessions by device": phones converting far below desktops point at your mobile pages. In the Customers category of Reports, "Returning customers" lists everyone with two or more orders. If that list is short, see how to get repeat customers. After the audit, track eight ecommerce KPIs, each with its formula and the report that shows it.

Shopify's pricing page lists "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics" on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. A report shows at most 1,000 rows, though its totals count them all, so export a long one. When orders drop suddenly, compare equal stretches of days and check which traffic source fell before you change a page.

Check 8: are you paying for apps you don't need?

Open Settings, then Billing, and click "View current charges", the app charges waiting for your next bill. Then open Settings, then Apps, and write one line per app: its job, and the report that shows what it earns. Two apps doing one job is a fail. So is an app whose job you can't name, or a feature you stopped using that still bills.

Some apps bill you directly, so their charge never shows on your Shopify bill. Uninstalling won't stop it either: cancel with the app's developer.

Before you uninstall, read the app's listing or click "Get support" under Settings, Apps: some apps leave changes in your theme that uninstalling won't undo. A charge from a billing cycle that already started can still reach your next bill. Some data can't come back either, so export what you need, then follow Shopify's uninstall steps from the app's three-dot menu.

If check 1 showed "Poor", open that rating's Over Time report from the summary. It marks app installs and theme updates on the chart, so you can see whether the rating fell after an app install.

Fix it with how to cut your app bill, whether apps slow your store and the free Shopify apps that stay free.

Which audit result should you fix first?

First, fix what stands between a shopper and paying: check 6, then 5. Search comes next, because those shoppers typed what they came for. Then take the step with the biggest drop in check 7.

Run the full audit once a quarter. Repeat checks 2, 5 and 6 after a theme change, a new app or a payment change, and before a big sale with the Black Friday checklist. Say you switch themes: a few good days, then orders slide on the same traffic, and the rerun shows which step broke.

Can Sledge run part of this audit for you?

Sledge is a Shopify search and filter app whose Growth Intelligence keeps reading your store after the audit ends. On a paid plan it reads your last 90 days of orders and the past week of searches, filters and carts. Then it suggests fixes, each tied to the Sledge tool that makes the change. Click a fix and that tool opens filled in, and nothing changes until you save.

Growth Intelligence's suggestions, minus any you dismiss, add up to one figure labeled "Est. potential" on the Growth Opportunities page. Say it reads $900: that's Sledge's estimate of what those fixes could add in a month, not a promise. After you save a fix, Growth Intelligence measures sales through Sledge after the change against an equal stretch before it.

Growth Intelligence turns on when you pick a paid plan. It runs weekly on Pro at $29.99 a month, twice a week on Scale and daily on Accelerate and Ultimate. On the 14-day free trial, the Signals tab in Sledge Analytics already flags one warning sign for seven of the eight checks, on the pages Sledge runs.

Signals never places a test order or rates your speed, so those checks stay yours too.