Magento Code Audit: When And Why Do You Need It?

As your online store evolves, its codebase gets enriched with new features and integrations. They are usually added piece by piece when needed. With time, your Magento code tends to get cluttered with duplicated extracts and outdated resources.

All that impedes its performance, security, and functionality. And ultimately affects your website’s ranking in search engines, bounce, and conversion rates.

In this article, our expert team reveals how you, as a business owner, can address these issues and benefit from a Magento code audit.

Why is code audit for Magento important?

Code analysis is a complex service aimed at assessing your website’s codebase. Its goal is to check the codebase’s quality, performance, security, and overall health. This process involves a thorough review conducted by experienced developers specializing in Magento.

Magento code review is an investment in your online store’s stability and reliability.

When to consider Magento code review?

Even though Magento is a highly reliable platform, you may need to resort to audits at different stages of your website’s life. For example, before scaling or introducing complex or demanding features. However, the most efficient code analysis use is addressing issues. Our expert team has drafted the list of signs that your website may need a Magento site audit:

• Declined performance
  There was a noticeable decrease in performance and conversions. It takes longer to load pages or complete actions than before.

• Frequent bugs and glitches
  You’re encountering software bugs and glitches that disrupt user experiences or business operations.

• Security concerns
  You have noticed suspicious activity in your logs, unauthorized database changes, or abnormal website traffic.

• High maintenance costs
  It takes developers more time to complete tasks for your website, and your server costs keep increasing.

• Your website is over 3 years old
  With time, libraries and frameworks need to be updated. Using obsolete resources can lead to compatibility issues and security vulnerabilities.

What is the Magento 2 code audit process?

1. Understanding your project
   The first step to improving your online store is to get to know your online store. At this stage, you need to outline any issues and pains you face with managing your website. You also provide access to your store to the developer team so that they can assess the scope of work.

2. Kick-starting your website’s audit
   At this stage, you agree on the timeline of the audit. After that, the developers start reviewing the code of your website. At Alva Commerce, code review is part of a complex service, Magento Technical Audit. It usually involves analyzing

   • Code quality
   • Performance
   • Security
   • Third-party integrations

3. Drafting the report
   After the audit is finished, the developer team creates a report based on the analysis results. It usually outlines the identified issues and suggested actions to address them. At this stage, you meet with the team to discuss the problems and how they impact your online store.

4. Developing the action plan
   Next, you agree on priorities and further work plans with the team. Improvement usually starts with the most painful areas that significantly impact your store’s ranking and conversions. This stage can be combined with implementing improvements suggested by a UX/UI audit to ensure better results.

5. Discussing the improvement results
   A commonly accepted practice for such audits is to provide comparative reports on the implemented improvements. They outline the issues before the enhancement and how these areas changed. For example, if code issues impact the speed of your store, the report includes speed indicators before and after the fixes.

6. Ensuring continuous support
   After the audit, it’s recommended to continue working with the same team on the further growth of your store. The developers who analyzed your store become familiar with your website’s peculiarities and logic. This means they can swiftly implement solutions that fit your store like a glove. Sticking with one developer team also ensures code and functionality consistency.

Want to try making a Magento 2 audit by yourself? We have a full guide with the checklist for you to make it easier.

What issues can Magento code review reveal?

A code audit is a powerful tool to check your store’s health and enhance sales. It can reveal a wide range of issues and areas for improvement within a website. These issues can impact various aspects of the website’s functionality, performance, security, and maintainability.

Security vulnerabilities

Code auditing is an effective way to prevent security breaches and mitigate vulnerabilities. They pinpoint potential vulnerabilities and weak points. Code analysis can identify improper input validation, SQL injection, or inadequate encryption. So you can timely address these issues and put in place security fixes.

Many websites rely on third-party libraries and components. A code audit assesses these components for known security vulnerabilities. Specialized Magento developers check for outdated libraries and dependencies that may have known issues. Keeping all components up-to-date is essential for maintaining a secure software ecosystem.

Another security aspect addressed by Magento audit is data safety. Developers review how sensitive data is handled, stored, and transmitted. They ensure that encryption is properly implemented and that data is securely stored. Additionally, they identify any authorization and permissions risks to prevent unauthorized access.

Note that website security is a complex area and besides code review, it requires a structured approach to prevent breaches.

Performance bottlenecks

Slow-loading websites can deter customers and affect your search engine rankings. A Magento code audit helps identify performance bottlenecks. It ensures that your online store loads quickly and provides a seamless user experience.

Code review includes inefficient database queries, resource-intensive processes, and other factors that can slow down your website.

Database queries are often a major source of performance issues. A code audit assesses how data is retrieved and manipulated. This enables the developers to optimize queries for speed and efficiency. Audits also check how your site uses server resources like CPU, memory, and bandwidth.

Code that has accumulated over time can become bloated and inefficient. A code audit can recommend a refactoring. It involves restructuring code to make it more streamlined and performant.

Unnecessary code complexity

Developers may come up with too complex logic for solving an issue or achieving the desired result. This often happens if you resort to one-time services or small teams where peer code review is not a common practice.

Overly complex code can be challenging to understand and modify. This means that developers need more time to make sense of code to make any changes you require. What is more, it can slow down the performance of your website and lower its SEO ranking. But code audit can address these issues. It can identify areas where simplification or abstraction is needed to improve code clarity.

Violations of coding standards and best practices

Coding standards are the rules that ensure a robust and maintainable software ecosystem. They establish consistent style and structure. When developers adhere to these standards, they make sure that the code is easy to read, understand, and collaborate on.

Coding standards often include best practices that help prevent common coding errors and bugs. By following these standards, developers can avoid pitfalls and create more reliable software.

Well-structured and consistent code is easier to maintain. This means that developers can understand the code’s intention whenever they look at it. As a result, they can make changes or fixes swiftly and confidently. For you as a business owner, it means fewer expenses on the developer’s efforts, because they will not waste much time on figuring out what’s going on in the code.

Developers may unintentionally deviate from coding standards, leading to inconsistencies. A Magento code review can identify these deviations, ensuring code uniformity and maintainability. It can assess whether the code follows industry-standard practices.

Code duplication

Duplicate code segments waste development time. Instead of reusing the existing code for similar functionality, developers write it from scratch. This can happen if different developers contribute to code without a cohesive structure. Duplication also occurs when the team does not have a clear strategy for code reuse.

Duplicate code also increases the risk of inconsistencies and maintenance challenges. Duplication may emerge at different stages of your project. For example, developers may inadvertently copy and paste code when implementing similar functionality. So, they end up duplicating code in different parts of the application.

A code review can spot redundant code and suggest refactoring for greater efficiency. It’s also an excellent tool for reviewing code quality and design decisions. For instance, if several bits of code are intended for a similar task, developers can identify and preserve the most efficient one.

What can you gain from regular Magento 2 code audits?

Regular code audits are the routine check-ups that ensure your online shop performs at its best. They identify and address issues early before they cause any disruptions. Prevention and timely prophylaxis are the two pillars of lasting success.

Long-term site health

Your goal as a business owner is to ensure your website is reliable and profitable. Routine Magento code analysis helps future-proof your online store. They focus on the most critical aspects of your Magento platform:

• Performance
  Continuous assessments and improvements ensure that your site remains fast and responsive.

• Security
  Ongoing audits help identify and address security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

• Scalability
  Code reviews ensure your website can adapt to changing business needs and handle increased traffic as it grows.

Higher conversion rates

According to Portent’s study, websites that load in 1 one second have a 5 times higher conversion rate than those that load 10 seconds. Faster page load times, achieved through code optimization, can improve user experience and reduce bounce rates. This, in turn, can lead to higher conversion rates as users are more likely to complete purchases on fast-loading sites.

Consistent approach to maintenance

Throughout its existence, your website will need technical fixes, improvements, and integrations. That’s why you need an expert team who understands your business onboard. If your store’s code is poorly structured, your developers will need time to determine what’s going on with your website, how it’s built, and its code structure. All that takes time you have to pay for.

By optimizing the code, you invest in easier and cheaper maintenance of your online shop. Code compliance with standards is also important for ranking in search engines. Companies like Google issue recommendations about code logic and structure. They tend to favor the websites that follow their guidelines and rank them higher.

To wrap it up

Your online store is a dynamic entity that evolves. It gains new features and integrations as your business grows. However, this continuous development can lead to a cluttered codebase. It may negatively impact your store’s performance, security, and overall functionality.

Regular Magento 2 code audits contribute to the long-term health of your website by maintaining code quality, enhancing security, optimizing performance, and ensuring scalability.

At Alva Commerce, we empower eCommerce businesses through high-quality technical solutions. Our ultimate goal is your success, and a Magento technical audit is just one of the many ways we can help you achieve it.