Website Usability Audit Checklist

Pull the trailing 30-day conversion rate, AOV, add-to-cart rate, checkout initiation, and bounce from GA4 or Triple Whale. These are the numbers you will compare against after fixes ship — without a baseline you can't tell if the audit moved the needle.

Note Shopify theme name and version, BigCommerce Stencil version, or WooCommerce + theme + plugin versions. Recent theme updates are often the cause of broken mobile checkout or layout shifts found later in the audit.

Top three collections by revenue should be reachable in one click from the home page on both desktop and mobile. Hamburger menus on mobile must expose these without forcing the user to scroll inside the drawer.

Breadcrumbs on product detail and product list pages should reflect the canonical category path and emit BreadcrumbList schema. Validate one PDP in Google's Rich Results Test.

Run Screaming Frog or Sitebulb against the live storefront. Common findings: discontinued SKUs without 301 redirects, blog posts linking to old PDPs, footer links to deprecated landing pages.

Confirm collection URLs follow /collections/{handle} and product URLs avoid duplicate paths via /collections/{handle}/products/{handle}. Set canonicals to the bare /products/{handle} form to prevent duplicate-content dilution.

Search a misspelled product name, a SKU, and a category term. Predictive search should return product cards with thumbnails and price. If using Searchanise, Klevu, or Algolia, check synonym dictionaries are current.

For best-sellers, confirm description includes materials, sizing, care, and shipping dimensions. Watch for unsubstantiated claims like 'FDA approved' or 'clinically proven' — those are FTC enforcement risks and need a substantiation file.

Each PDP should have at least 5 images: hero, lifestyle, scale reference, detail, and packaging. Confirm images are served as WebP/AVIF and lazy-loaded below the fold.

Confirm Yotpo / Judge.me / Okendo widget loads on PDP and emits Product + AggregateRating schema. Spot-check a 1-star review to see what the customer sees and to flag any unaddressed quality complaints to the product team.

FTC's pending junk-fee rule and existing state laws require all-in pricing or clear pre-checkout disclosure. Confirm shipping cost calculator on cart, free-shipping threshold visible, and any handling fees disclosed before payment step.

Body text minimum 16px on mobile, line-height ≥ 1.4. Run a contrast checker (axe DevTools) against the price, Add-to-Cart label, and review stars — these are the highest-leverage elements on the page.

Test on a real iPhone and a real Android device, not just Chrome DevTools. Common bugs: sticky headers covering Add-to-Cart, drawer cart cut off below the fold, fixed footer hiding the buy button on iOS Safari.

Place a real order on mobile from cart to confirmation. Test Shop Pay / Apple Pay / Google Pay express checkouts and a manual card entry. Record where the user has to tap and whether autofill works on the address fields.

Open a ticket with the developer or theme partner. Include device, OS version, browser, exact step where checkout failed, and a screen recording. A 30% mobile conversion drop after a CSS change is a common root cause — bisect against the last theme deploy.

Add to Cart and Checkout should be the highest-contrast buttons on their respective pages. Secondary CTAs (Save for Later, Continue Shopping) should be visually subordinate. No more than one primary CTA per viewport.

Gorgias / Zendesk / Re:amaze chat widget should be reachable from cart and checkout pages without overlapping the Place Order button. Test that the chat trigger doesn't block any form fields on a 375px-wide viewport.

Use axe DevTools or Lighthouse against home, a PLP, a PDP, cart, and checkout. ADA Title III lawsuits against e-commerce sites are common — the homepage and checkout are the highest-risk pages.

Alt text should describe the image, not stuff keywords. Decorative images should use alt="". Sample 20 PDPs and check Shopify's media uploader or your PIM for missing alts.

Every input on checkout, account creation, and contact forms must have a programmatic label (not just placeholder text). Error messages must be associated with the field via aria-describedby and announced to screen readers.

Tab from product page through Add-to-Cart, cart, address, payment, place order. Focus indicators must be visible at every step. Skip-to-content link should appear on first tab from the top of the page.

If selling into EU/UK, cookie banner via OneTrust / Cookiebot must block non-essential cookies until consent. For California traffic, confirm the 'Do Not Sell or Share' link is present and the GPC signal is honored.

Run PageSpeed Insights on home, PLP, PDP, and cart. Targets: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Heavy review widgets and chat scripts are the usual LCP/INP offenders.

Confirm cert validity through expiration date, HSTS header set, and no mixed-content warnings in DevTools console. Embedded YouTube and legacy CDN-hosted images are the typical mixed-content sources.

List every installed app with checkout or customer-data access. Remove unused apps — each one is an attack surface and a sub-processor under GDPR. Confirm Shopify Payments / Stripe handles card data so you stay in SAQ A scope.

Shopify auto-snapshots themes but not products or metafields — confirm Rewind or Matrixify export runs nightly. For WooCommerce, verify host backups plus a separate offsite backup. Test a restore at least quarterly.

Hero image should be served as WebP at the rendered size with fetchpriority="high". Defer Klaviyo, chat, and analytics scripts below the fold. Run before/after PSI to confirm LCP improvement before closing the ticket.

Cloudflare or Shopify CDN should cache static assets with long max-age and fingerprinted filenames. Confirm cache purge runs on theme deploy so customers don't see a half-updated layout.

Score each finding by revenue impact and effort. Mobile checkout bugs and accessibility violations on the homepage are P0; blog post 404s and missing alt text on archived products are P3.

30-minute review with the marketing manager and the Shopify developer (or agency). Confirm owner and sprint for each P0 and P1. Anything not assigned at the end of this meeting won't ship.