Shopify Mid-Year Store Audit: 10-Point Checklist

A Shopify store audit checklist isn't something you run once and forget. The best time to audit is mid-year — you have five months of data, enough runway to fix problems before peak season, and no major sales events competing for your attention. Most merchants won't look at this data until November, when BFCM is two weeks away and there's nothing left to fix.

A mid-year audit isn't about rebuilding your store. It's about finding the three or four things that are quietly costing you money and fixing them while the stakes are low. Skip this, and you'll spend Q4 firefighting problems you could've solved in an afternoon.

1. Check Your Site Speed Score on Mobile

Run your store through Google PageSpeed Insights right now. Not your homepage — your top-selling product page. That's the page most visitors actually land on.

Target benchmarks for 2026:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): under 2.5 seconds
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): under 0.1
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): under 200ms

If your mobile score is below 50, you likely have a theme or app problem. The most common culprit: apps loading JavaScript on every page even when they're only used on one. Check your theme's theme.liquid file for app scripts that don't need to be global. Removing two or three unused app snippets can shave a full second off your load time.

2. How Wide Is Your Mobile vs. Desktop Conversion Gap?

Go to Shopify Analytics → Reports → Sessions by device type, then compare conversion rates. Across ecommerce, desktop converts at roughly 4.8% while mobile sits around 2.9%. That's a 1.7x gap. If yours is wider, your mobile experience has specific problems worth investigating.

The usual suspects: tiny tap targets, forms that require too much typing on a phone screen, product images that load slowly on cellular connections, and checkout flows that don't autofill properly on mobile browsers.

Since mobile accounts for over 59% of all ecommerce traffic, even a 0.5% improvement in mobile conversion rate can matter more than a 2% improvement on desktop.

3. Find Your Top and Bottom SKUs by Profit

Revenue isn't profit. Pull your product-level data and calculate actual margin after cost of goods, shipping, and returns for each SKU. Most stores follow an 80/20 pattern — a small number of products generate the bulk of your profit.

What you're looking for:

• Winners: Products with high margin AND high volume. Double down on these with better product pages, more ad budget, and featured placement in collections.
• Dead weight: Products that sell occasionally but cost you money per order after shipping and returns. Consider raising prices, bundling them, or removing them entirely.
• Hidden gems: Products with strong margins but low traffic. These need visibility, not discounts.

If you can't calculate per-SKU profit because you haven't tracked COGS in Shopify, start now. Go to Products → select a product → Cost per item. Filling this in for your top 20 products takes about 30 minutes and changes how you make every decision going forward.

4. Audit Your App Stack Cost vs. Value

The average Shopify store spends $60–$120/month on paid apps. Pull up Settings → Apps and sales channels, then list every paid app with its monthly cost. Next to each one, write down the last time it directly contributed to a sale, saved you time, or solved a problem you still have.

Red flags to look for:

• Two apps doing the same thing (common with email marketing + popup apps)
• Apps you installed for a one-time campaign and forgot about
• Apps with features now built into Shopify natively (countdown timers, basic discounts, email)

A healthy app spend sits between 0.5% and 2% of monthly revenue. If you're doing $10,000/month and spending $250 on apps, something's off. Cut the apps that don't earn their keep. Most stores can save $30–$80/month without losing any functionality.

5. Review Your Abandoned Cart Recovery Rate

About 70% of online shopping carts get abandoned, according to Baymard Institute's analysis of 50 studies. That number isn't going down. What matters is how many of those carts you're recovering.

Check your recovery performance:

• Baseline: Most stores recover 3–5% of abandoned carts
• Good: 5–10% recovery rate
• Top performers: 10–14% with optimized multi-channel sequences

If you're below 5%, check three things. First, is your recovery email actually sending? Shopify's built-in abandoned checkout emails need to be manually enabled. Second, how quickly does it send? The first email should go out within one hour, not 24 hours. Third, does it include the specific products they left behind with images and a direct link back to checkout?

Mobile cart abandonment runs even higher at about 80%, so if your traffic is mostly mobile, recovery emails are even more critical.

6. Check Your Email List Health

Open your email marketing tool (Klaviyo, Shopify Email, whatever you use) and check these numbers:

• List growth rate: Are you adding subscribers faster than you're losing them?
• Open rate: Below 20% means your subject lines need work or your list has too many inactive contacts
• Unsubscribe rate: Above 0.5% per campaign means you're sending too often or to the wrong segments

The mid-year fix: suppress anyone who hasn't opened an email in 90 days. They're hurting your deliverability, which means your emails to engaged subscribers are more likely to land in spam. Cleaning your list feels counterintuitive — fewer subscribers, but better results per send.

If you don't have at least one automated flow running (welcome series, post-purchase, or browse abandonment), set up the welcome series first. It's the highest-ROI automation you can build.

7. Track Your SEO Rankings Movement

You don't need expensive tools for a basic check. Search Google for your top five target keywords and note where you appear. If you ranked on page one in January and you're on page two now, something changed — a competitor published better content, your page speed dropped, or Google updated its algorithm.

Quick SEO health checks:

• Check your index count. Search site:yourdomain.com on Google. The result count should roughly match your actual page count. More means duplicate content. Fewer means pages aren't getting indexed.
• Compare search performance. In Google Search Console → Performance, compare the last 3 months to the previous 3. Look for pages that lost clicks — those need attention first.
• Review meta descriptions. Check your top 10 product pages for unique meta descriptions. Shopify auto-generates these if you don't write them, and auto-generated descriptions don't rank well.

8. Evaluate Your Payment Method Mix

Go to Analytics → Reports and look at orders by payment method. If more than 80% of your orders come through a single payment method, you're likely losing customers who prefer alternatives.

What to check:

• Do you offer express checkout? Shop Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay reduce checkout friction significantly. Shop Pay alone has been shown to increase checkout-to-order conversion.
• Is buy now, pay later available? BNPL options like Shop Pay Installments or Klarna appeal to customers buying items above $50.
• For COD markets: If you sell in regions where cash on delivery is common, check what percentage of your orders are COD vs. prepaid. A shift toward prepaid means your trust signals are working. A stubborn 90%+ COD rate means customers don't trust the payment process enough to pay upfront.

If you're running a COD store and want to shift more customers toward prepaid, offering a small prepaid discount (5–10% off) or requiring a partial deposit on COD orders changes the ratio over time. EasySell lets you set up partial payments and prepaid discounts directly on your order form without code.

9. Calculate Your Shipping Cost as a Percentage of Revenue

Pull your total shipping costs for the last five months and divide by total revenue. If shipping is eating more than 10–12% of revenue, you have a margin problem that grows with every order.

Common fixes:

• Renegotiate carrier rates. If you're shipping 100+ orders/month, you have enough volume to ask for better rates. Most carriers will negotiate if you ask — especially if you can show them competitor quotes.
• Set a free shipping threshold above your AOV. If your average order is $45, set free shipping at $55. Customers add one more item instead of paying for shipping. You increase AOV and absorb the shipping cost with the extra margin.
• Use regional carriers for domestic delivery. National carriers aren't always cheapest for short-zone shipments. A regional carrier covering your top delivery area can cut costs by 15–25%.

Track this number monthly, not quarterly. Shipping costs creep up as carriers adjust surcharges, and the increases compound if you're not watching.

10. Plot Your Customer Acquisition Cost Trend

Calculate your CAC for each month of 2026: total marketing spend divided by new customers acquired. The number itself matters less than the direction. Is it going up, down, or flat?

Rising CAC with flat or falling revenue per customer means your growth model is breaking. You're paying more to acquire customers who spend the same amount. This is the single most important trend line for any Shopify store heading into Q3.

If CAC is rising, the fix isn't always "spend more on ads." Consider these alternatives:

• Increase repeat purchase rate. Getting a second order from an existing customer costs a fraction of acquiring a new one. Post-purchase email flows, loyalty programs, and subscription offers all improve this number.
• Increase AOV. If each customer spends more per order, you can afford a higher CAC while staying profitable. Upsells, bundles, and quantity discounts are the fastest levers here.
• Diversify acquisition channels. If 80% of your ad spend goes to Meta, test allocating 20% to a lower-cost channel like Pinterest, SEO content, or Shopify's Shop Campaigns.

Turn the Audit Into a Plan

You don't need to fix all ten items this week. Rank them by impact — which ones affect the most revenue if improved? — and tackle the top three before June. That gives you a clean foundation before Q3 planning starts and BFCM prep begins in August.

The stores that perform best during peak season aren't the ones that scramble in November. They're the ones that ran an audit in May, fixed the leaks that mattered, and showed up to Q4 with a store that was already converting well.