Before you spend another dollar on ads, spend thirty minutes finding the leaks. Most stores we look at are losing sales they have already paid for. Visitors arrive, hesitate and leave, for reasons that are cheap to fix and easy to miss when it's your own store. Here are the twelve checks we run first, in the order that usually pays back fastest. Open your store on your phone, set a timer, and go.
1. Speed on a real phone (3 min)
Run your home page and one product page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Don't obsess over the score; look at the diagnostics. The usual culprits on Shopify are oversized images, apps that load scripts on every page, and video autoplaying in the hero. Fix: compress images, remove apps you don't use, and ask whether the hero video is earning its weight.
2. The first screen on mobile (2 min)
Load the home page on your phone. Before scrolling, can a stranger tell what you sell, who it's for, and what to tap next? If the first screen is a full-bleed lifestyle image with a tiny logo, the answer is no. Fix: a clear headline, one sentence of who-it's-for, one button.
3. Product page essentials (4 min)
Open your best-seller and tick off: multiple photos including one in use or on a body; price visible without scrolling; size or variant selector that works; shipping cost and delivery time stated near the button; returns policy one tap away; at least a few reviews. Every missing item is a reason to hesitate. Fix: the ones you can do today are shipping and returns. Write them under the add-to-cart button.
4. Trust signals (2 min)
Is there a real "About" page with people or a story? A contact page with an address or a phone/WhatsApp number? Payment method icons at checkout? A visible policy footer? Small brands win on trust, and trust is built from small, checkable facts. Fix: add a WhatsApp or email contact to the footer of every page.
5. Checkout friction (3 min)
Add a product and go through to the payment screen. Is guest checkout on? Are accelerated payments (Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal) offered? Does the shipping estimate match what the product page promised? Are you asking for a phone number you don't need? Fix: turn on express payments and remove optional fields.
6. Navigation and collections (2 min)
Can a visitor get from the home page to any product in two taps? Are collections named the way customers think ("Leggings", not "Core Collection SS26")? Are there empty or near-empty collections in the menu? Fix: rename collections in customer language; hide anything with fewer than three products.
7. Site search (1 min)
Search for your best-seller by a nickname or a misspelling. Search for something you don't sell. If the first returns nothing useful and the second returns a blank page, you're losing the most motivated visitors you have. Fix: add synonyms in your search app, and design the no-results page to show best-sellers.
8. Abandoned checkout recovery (2 min)
Shopify records every abandoned checkout. Open the list. Then check whether anything goes out to those people automatically (an email, a WhatsApp message) and whether it goes out within an hour or two. Fix: one well-written recovery message beats a three-message sequence you never set up.
9. Is Google seeing your pages? (3 min)
Open Google Search Console. Under Pages, look at how many are "Not indexed" and why. Common Shopify surprises: duplicate collection URLs, tag pages, or an app that added noindex to half the site. Then search Google for site:yourstore.com and see what comes back. Fix: depends on the reason, but knowing is the first step.
10. Page titles and descriptions (3 min)
In the same Search Console report, or in your Shopify SEO settings, read the titles of your top ten pages. "Home | Brand Name" tells Google and a shopper nothing. Fix: product name + the one thing that matters (material, use, audience) + brand. Descriptions should answer "why this one?" in one sentence.
11. Is your tracking telling the truth? (3 min)
Place a test order (or use a 100% discount code) with Meta's Pixel Helper and Google Tag Assistant open. Did a single purchase event fire, not zero and not two? Is the value right? Every ad decision you make downstream depends on this being correct. Fix: if events double-fire, you probably have both a theme integration and an app doing the same job; keep one.
12. Policies and the footer (2 min)
Refund, shipping, privacy and terms pages exist and say real things, not template text with "[Company Name]" still in it. Google and payment providers check; so do careful customers. Fix: Shopify generates policy templates in Settings → Policies; edit them so they're true for your store.
Then what?
Pick the three failed checks that touch the most visitors (usually speed, product page and checkout) and fix those first. Note your conversion rate before you start and read it again two weeks later. That is a real test with a real reading, and it's the beginning of running your store like a lab. If you'd rather we ran the full version of this audit on your store, send us the link.
