Shopify store audit checklist: 40 checks before you spend on ads

A Shopify store audit checks eight areas before you spend money sending traffic: speed, theme code and apps, product pages, checkout and payments, SEO and schema, analytics and pixels, trust and policies, and AI-search readiness. You can run all 40 checks below with free tools in about a day. Fix checkout and tracking problems first, because ads make every leak bigger and broken pixels teach the ad platforms the wrong lessons.

I run some version of this list on every store before I touch the code. Founders usually come to me with one symptom, like "conversion dropped" or "ads stopped working". The audit almost always finds three or four smaller causes stacked on top of each other. Running the whole list stops you fixing the loudest problem and missing the expensive one.

What tools do you need for a Shopify store audit?

All of the tools are free, and most of them are already in your admin. You don't need a paid analyzer to start.

Two notes on the speed tools. Shopify's report needs the password page off to collect real user data, and it can lag by up to 36 hours. PageSpeed Insights shows two different things: field data from real users and a simulated lab run. Google's docs say the values may differ. Field data is what your customers actually got.

How do you check speed and Core Web Vitals?

Start with field data, then use lab tests to find causes. Google's "good" thresholds are LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.

Check 5 is the one people skip. Shopify's report plots each metric over time against changes such as app installs, theme updates and new code, so you can see exactly which change made the store slower. For the fixes themselves, see why your Shopify store is slow.

What should you check in the theme code and apps?

Most slow or buggy Shopify stores carry code nobody remembers adding. Every app you've ever installed may have left snippets, script tags or app embeds behind.

Theme Check is Shopify's linter for Liquid and JSON. It flags syntax errors, missing templates, unused snippets, deprecated tags and performance problems. Leftover app code is the most common thing I remove on audits. I wrote up the pattern in why Shopify apps slow your store.

What makes a product page pass an audit?

A product page passes when a buyer on a phone can see the price, pick a variant and add to cart without scrolling, and trusts you enough to do it. Audit your top five products by revenue, not a random one.

For Indian stores, check 12 matters more than most CRO checklists admit. Buyers want to know when it arrives and whether they can pay on delivery before they commit. On Mahina's build, where I turned the Figma designs into Shopify sections, average order value rose 28% and the speed score stayed at 95+, so a richer product page doesn't have to cost you performance. The full PDP method is in my product page CRO checklist.

How do you audit checkout and payments?

Place real orders. Admin settings tell you what should happen; a test order on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data tells you what does.

Two dates make checks 19 and 20 urgent. Shopify's checkout upgrade guide says non-Plus stores had until August 26, 2026 to upgrade their Thank you and Order status pages, and that existing customizations are replaced in the upgrade. Any tracking code that lived in the old additional scripts box has to be rebuilt with web pixels or app pixels. Shopify Scripts stopped running on 30 June 2026, so a tiered discount or a COD rule written as a Script has simply stopped working.

Remember that COD is a manual payment method on Shopify, so it carries no Shopify transaction fee, while UPI and card orders through a gateway do. If prepaid volume has grown, check your plan against the Shopify pricing hub and fee calculator.

If you'd rather have someone run these checks with you, tell me about your store and I'll start with checkout and tracking.

Which SEO and schema checks matter most?

The ones that decide whether Google can find and understand your pages at all. Rankings come later.

If check 21 fails badly, stop and read why a Shopify store doesn't show up on Google before anything else. For check 24, the field-by-field list is in my Shopify schema markup checklist.

How do you audit analytics and pixels?

You audit tracking by comparing what the pixels report with what Shopify recorded. If Meta says 120 purchases and Shopify shows 80 orders, your campaigns are optimising on fiction.

On check 28, Shopify's help page is specific: Standard uses only the Meta pixel, while Enhanced and Maximum add Meta's Conversions API, which sends events from Shopify's servers. On check 30, Shopify notes that in markets that require consent, such as the EEA and UK, web pixels only run after the visitor grants the permissions set for that pixel. Expect lower reported numbers there. That's the consent rules working as designed.

Which trust and policy checks should you run?

Buyers check trust signals before paying, and some sales channels check them too. Shopify's agentic storefronts, for example, need your terms of service, privacy policy and return and refund policy completed in Settings, then Policies, before products can appear in ChatGPT.

Automated policies are a starting point. Shopify says plainly that automation doesn't guarantee completeness, so read what's published. For check 35, see GST invoicing on Shopify.

Is your Shopify store ready for AI search?

Partly, if the basics above pass. AI assistants need to be allowed to read your pages, and they need pages that answer real buyer questions in plain text.

OpenAI's crawler docs say OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT search, and recommend allowing it in robots.txt. Shopify's default robots.txt allows all crawlers on public pages, so this usually fails only when someone has edited robots.txt.liquid. A real lead found me through ChatGPT in August 2026, which is why I now treat checks 36 to 39 as part of the standard audit.

How do you prioritise what to fix after an audit?

Rank fixes by how much money each problem costs per day, then by effort. My order is almost always the same:

1. Anything that stops an order: failed payment methods, test mode, broken COD rules, dead Scripts logic.
2. Tracking that misreports purchases, because ad spend depends on it.
3. Indexing blockers: password page, noindex, robots.txt, missing sitemap.
4. Mobile speed on product pages, starting with your best sellers.
5. Product page fixes from checks 11 to 15.
6. Trust, policies and AI-search checks.

Score each failed check by impact (high, medium, low) and effort (an hour, a day, a week). The high-impact, one-hour fixes go first, and on most stores there are several of them.

Can a tool run this audit for you?

Some of it. Two of the tools I built cover parts of this list. My free Theme Audit skill for Claude Code reads your theme and runs 80+ checks across performance, SEO, AEO and conversion, with a scored report. ClearAudit audits the conversion side of a live store. Neither can place a COD order on your phone or tell whether your reviews are real, so checks 16 to 18, 27 and 34 stay manual.

What I'd do

If you're about to put serious money into Meta or Google ads, I'd block out one day and run all 40 checks, starting with checkout and tracking. I'd write every failure into a sheet with an impact and effort score, fix the high-impact one-hour items that week, and only then switch the campaigns on.

For Bloom Bodysuits I ran the CRO work and directed the Meta ads together, and revenue grew 22% month on month. Having the store and the campaigns in the same hands meant every fix showed up in the ad data quickly.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your store before a launch or a sale, send me the details here. I'll tell you which of the 40 fail and what each fix should cost, using the numbers on my developer rates page.

Related reads

• Why is my Shopify store so slow? Core Web Vitals fixes
• Shopify product page CRO: a 10-point PDP checklist
• Shopify schema markup checklist
• Shopify Theme Audit skill for Claude Code
• Shopify store not loading or 'unavailable'? What each error means

Sources

• web.dev: Web Vitals and thresholds
• Shopify Help Center: web performance reports
• Google: About PageSpeed Insights
• Shopify.dev: Theme Check
• Shopify Help Center: apps in your theme (app embeds)
• Shopify Help Center: checkout extensibility upgrade guide
• Shopify.dev changelog: Shopify Scripts will be deprecated on June 30, 2026
• Shopify Help Center: manual payment methods
• Shopify Help Center: pixels overview
• Shopify Help Center: Facebook data sharing
• Shopify Help Center: adding store policies
• Shopify Help Center: agentic storefronts
• Shopify Help Center: selling in ChatGPT
• OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers
• Google Search Central: get your website on Google