Platform audit guides

Different platforms break in different ways. These guides cover the issues each one actually produces, what you can control, and where auditing effort pays off.

Last updated 2026-07-28

• How to audit a WordPress site WordPress sites fail in predictable ways: plugin bloat, unoptimised images, stray noindex settings and duplicate archive pages. Here is what to check first.
• How to audit a Shopify store Shopify handles the basics but creates duplicate collection URLs, heavy app scripts and thin product pages. Here is exactly what to check on a store.
• How to audit a Webflow site Webflow produces clean markup but lets designers break heading order, ship huge hero images and forget CMS collection templates. Here is the checklist.
• How to audit a Squarespace site Squarespace trades control for convenience. Here is what you can actually fix, what you cannot, and where audits find the most value on a Squarespace site.

Does the platform change how you audit a site?

It changes what you look for and what you can act on, not the checks themselves. A crawler runs the same tests everywhere; what differs is which failures are likely, which are fixable, and which are simply how the platform works.

The practical consequence is that platform knowledge saves you time in triage. A duplicate-URL warning on Shopify is usually the product-in-collection URL pattern working as designed and needs a canonical, not a panic. The same warning on WordPress more often means archives, pagination or an attachment page are being indexed unnecessarily. Identical finding, different cause, different fix.

The other reason to know the platform is knowing when to stop. On hosted builders like Squarespace, some findings — generated markup, bundled scripts, image handling — are not yours to change, and effort spent on them is wasted. Knowing which category a finding falls into is most of the skill in reading an audit.

What does every platform get wrong in the same way?

Four things, regardless of stack: duplicate URLs without canonicals, pages that ship far more JavaScript and image weight than the content needs, headings chosen for their appearance rather than their structure, and templated pages too thin to be worth indexing.

Those four account for the majority of findings on a typical small-business site of any platform. They are also why an audit that reports only per-page scores is less useful than one that groups a finding by how many pages it affects — a template-level cause with one fix looks like fifty separate problems until you group it.