Here’s why you need a Magento code audit for your store
Better performance
Website performance is crucial to delivering a user-friendly shopping experience, and a slow-loading website can
directly affect your company’s bottom line. Accurately diagnosing performance issues requires a thoughtful and
deductive approach.
Several factors contribute to website performance, including server-side elements and the frontend and backend code.
Everything from misconfigured cron jobs or indexers to more complex JavaScript bundling issues can lead to a slow
Magento site. Therefore, knowing where to look is crucial.
Excessive use of third-party extensions or using poorly developed ones can also lead to slow websites. Carefully
analyzing each of these aspects and using a process of elimination to locate and resolve bottlenecks is the best
approach to achieving top-tier website performance.
Poorly written and unoptimized JavaScript introduced by third-party themes and extensions is one of the primary
sources for poor site performance. Similarly, extensions making unnecessary or excessive database requests can also
create a bottleneck at the database.
While eliminating such extensions is the easiest way, an audit can help identify and address problems arising from
other areas like delayed server response times, website cookie usage, DOM element size, and HTTP requests due to
third-party code.
Once problematic extensions are identified, you can choose to remove or replace them entirely. When substitution and
elimination aren’t possible, Magento
consulting agencies can help you optimize third-party code to suit your website
by tailoring themes and extensions to your business needs.
Prevent crashes
A website that crashes out of the blue can be disastrous, especially during peak traffic hours. Each hour of
downtime can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales and damage your business reputation.
A custom-designed 404 page with alternate ways to contact your business and links to social media can help soften
the blow and reduce the impact of a crashed website. But you still risk losing sales if customers head over to your
competitors’ website to place their orders.
Several factors can lead to a crashed website, including:
- — Inadequate hardware resources
- — Running outdated versions of software
- — Cron issues
- — Unoptimized database
- — Incorrectly installing or updating extensions
- — Compromised website.
While some of these are easy to fix, most require a thorough understanding of the platform. You can independently
address hardware issues or outdated software issues. However, estimating hardware requirements and updating software
versions are always best left to the experts.
Failing to do so can lead you to overspend on unnecessary server resources or suffering from new website errors due
to incompatible software. Therefore, a Magento code audit will help you identify your website shortcomings
accurately and address them effectively with professional recommendations.
Eliminate vulnerabilities
Ecommerce stores are prime targets for exploits due to the wealth of confidential information they possess. Every
day,
thousands of hackers globally deploy scripts to scan the internet for vulnerable websites in an attempt to find
security
loopholes.
Once detected, they exploit those vulnerabilities to access customer data, assume customer identities using stolen
passwords or session tokens, and inject malicious redirects into the website. This can be catastrophic for a
business as
they risk suffering PCI compliance issues and potential lawsuits from their customers.
Something as rudimentary as incorrectly configured filesystem or database permissions on a server can provide
hackers
access to website data and the ability to insert malicious code. Poorly developed extensions can also introduce
vulnerabilities and lead to code injections, authentication issues, and data exposure.
A timely audit can help identify such issues preemptively and prevent potential catastrophes. A typical Magento code
audit consists of testing core modules and third-party extensions for code integrity and checking for code that
introduces unnecessary overrides over Magento’s core functionality.
Enhance website UX/UI
Magento allows merchants to introduce unique functionality to their websites and enhance their usability. It
provides a
modular architecture that bundles core functionality into discrete modules to help developers modify or replace them
without affecting other areas of its code.
However, functionality at the cost of performance is counterintuitive to your UI/UX design endeavors. Therefore,
judiciously choosing and installing extensions is vital to maintaining fast page load times and ensuring a seamless
user
experience.
A code audit can help you improve website performance, prevent crashes, and eliminate security vulnerabilities by
identifying problems in your website code. These factors combined create a net positive effect on your website’s
user
experience.
Improve website SEO
Google’s core web vitals emphasize performance. They recommend optimizing a website for three metrics vital to a
good user experience — page load time, interactivity, and visual stability. If you’ve been struggling to increase
your
website rank on Google’s search results pages, a Magento code audit can benefit your business tremendously.
Several factors contribute to a high page ranking, including:
- — Website performance
- — Accessibility and usability
- — Quality of content
A Magento code audit helps you identify areas of improvement in the performance and security of your website,
allowing
you to meet Google’s recommended targets. An improvement in those aspects can affect your search engine rankings
positively and help you decrease your reliance on paid traffic for sales.
