Why A Code Audit is Critical For Your Site
You might have questions like these:
- How healthy is my Adobe Commerce (Magento) store?
- Am I running on the latest version of Magento?
- Are all the extensions needed and are they all upgraded?
- Is my website missing any of the security patches?
- Has my website been developed with best practice in mind?
- How much can I scale with the current website as my eCommerce business is growing?
- How secure is my hosting environment?
- Why is the backend/admin area on my Magento website so slow?
- Why have my sales declined?
Don’t have answers to these questions? Oof. Not good.
Owning an Adobe Commerce (Magento) store these days can be a real challenge. From security patches to upgrades, Adobe Commerce is constantly improving, and merchants must keep up, or they face potential security breaches and poor site performance. Having the right team to support the site is vital.
What is a Code Audit?
An eCommerce code audit is an analysis of the source code of a software solution. It’s both a “regular checkup” and a “last look” that ensures a website and its components are free of security breaches and other possible issues. It also allows developers to more quickly assess the issues and prioritize fixes.
There are three main categories where the audit is based:
- Code maturity (Does the code follow best practices?)
- Code maintainability (Can the code be easily updated in the future?)
- Security (Does my code protect me?)
When an audit is performed, each individual file of the system is checked for the above three points. It’s a holistic diagnostic analysis of how strong an eCommerce solution is. Audits should also be conducted by an Adobe Partner whenever possible. This ensures thorough analysis and a deep understanding of potential problems.
Who needs an audit?
Simple: Any eCommerce site that has not conducted a code audit in a year. It’s especially critical for industries that rarely improve upon their website or services. It is time to take stock of your website’s health and create a roadmap to optimization. Without it, eventually, a site is liable to succumb to one of many problems. Code audits solve this through three important channels.
Code Optimization
Customers (and investors) hate using old, obsolete, or clunky software. With new iterations and efficiencies in software as time goes on, competitors have the opportunity to provide excellent products and services, fast. It leads to losses in sales, opens the door to competitors, and gives consumers the wrong impression of your brand.
Maintainability
But let’s say you know your code is solid. Everything is optimized because your programmers are rock stars. Great! But how easy is your online marketplace or project to upkeep? Maintainability is the practice of structuring, organizing, and writing code that is efficient, easy to navigate, and can be updated with future iterations. With especially large catalogs of products, sites can have incorrectly configured rules which affect site speed, future updates, and more. Solutions Architects are eCommerce experts who can ensure a website can be maintained with efficiency and reduce issues. This includes the last major consideration of an eCommerce audit: Security.
Security
It’s been proven that large, established companies are more likely to experience the threat of cyber attacks due to their revenue and recognizability. What’s worse, these attacks are becoming more frequent, and more complex. A code audit can spot critical errors and exploitable aspects of code. Developers can remedy these cyber security issues before hackers and criminals can attempt to exploit them.
Human Element has years of experience conducting code audits for a plethora of clients. The goal is to see how healthy their Adobe Commerce (Magento) application is and what can be done to refine it.
