A useful WooCommerce audit is not a long PDF of generic advice. It is a pass through the parts of the store that lose money when they fail: catalog, cart, checkout, email, taxes, and the admin screens the owner uses every day.
The shopping path
Place a test order with the same payment method a real customer would use, including a coupon and a shipping choice if those exist. Then refund or complete the order so you do not leave junk in reports. Confirm order emails, customer emails, and any webhooks to fulfillment or accounting tools. A storefront that looks fine can still drop orders at the last step.
Plugins, themes, and leftover checkout extras
List every plugin that touches cart, checkout, fees, or payments. Abandoned payment add-ons and old page-builder checkout widgets are frequent sources of fatal errors and slow pages. If two plugins try to customize the same checkout field, you will feel it as a conflict long before you see a clean error message.
PHP, WooCommerce, and WordPress versions
Note the current PHP version, WordPress version, WooCommerce version, and whether they are officially compatible. An audit should say what is safe to update and what needs a staging test first. Jumping several major versions on a live store is how quiet deprecations become a white screen.
Performance around the money pages
Home page speed matters, but checkout speed matters more. Look at how many scripts load on cart and checkout, whether product images are oversized, and whether object caching is configured correctly around dynamic cart data. Caching the checkout page for everyone is a classic way to show one customer another customer’s cart.
Security and access
Review admin users, shop managers, unused accounts, and whether file editing is disabled in WordPress. Stores attract malware because they handle accounts and sometimes card flows. An audit should mention backup quality too: where copies live, how old they are, and whether anyone has restored one successfully.
If you want this kind of review on a live store, start on the WooCommerce repair page or the contact form.