We have previously covered the concept of Technical Debt in eCommerce: Causes, Costs, & How to Manage ItFrom conversion loss to rising costs, learn how tech debt builds up, how to identify it, & how to tackle it without starting from scratch.Technical Debt in eCommerce and how all technology platforms naturally degrade over time as features are added, integrations evolve, and business requirements change. This is not a failure of the system, but a normal outcome of long-running digital products operating in real business environments.
If you are running Magento (or any open-source or self-hosted eCommerce solution), this dynamic is often more visible. Without deliberate oversight, small issues tend to accumulate quietly, gradually affecting performance, security, maintainability, or overall operational stability.
Whether you are periodically reviewing platform health, investigating recurring issues, or preparing for a larger initiative such as an upgrade or migration, a systematic audit helps establish a factual baseline before decisions are made. This article provides an overview of the main components of a Magento (Adobe Commerce) audit and what teams should assess.
TMO Group is an Adobe-certified partner offering Magento diagnostics, optimization, and ongoing platform support and maintenance services for Global brands.
Why is Auditing Magento Necessary?
Adobe Commerce gives teams a ton of liberty when it comes to extensibility. Why Magento Still Wins for Complex Business LogicLearn how Magento’s layered architecture and modular design enable complex commerce logic, safe customization, and long-term scalability.This makes Magento a strong fit for brands with complex business models, catalogs, fulfillment models, compliance requirements.
Compared to SaaS solutions like Shopify or BigCommerce, where infrastructure, upgrades, and security are largely absorbed by the platform, Magento also means owning more of the stack in terms of infrastructure and hosting, platform upgrades, performance tuning, and more.
While this can be great, it often means that if left unchecked, Magento implementations can quickly grow in complexity across several dimensions at once:
- Custom code and extensions: Business logic is frequently embedded in custom modules or third-party extensions, which can influence performance, upgradeability, and stability in non-obvious ways.
- Integrations and data flows: Connections to ERP, PIM, OMS, analytics, payment, and marketplace systems introduce dependencies that may degrade gradually rather than fail outright.
- Infrastructure and configuration: Caching strategies, indexing behavior, queue workers, and hosting configuration can drift over time as traffic patterns and feature requirements change.
As a result, teams often manage parts of the stack separately, addressing needs or issues in isolation and as they arise, which makes it harder to see how decisions in one area affect the stack as a whole.
An audit is intended to bridge this gap by shifting the focus from reactive fixes to a system-level understanding of the platform’s health, typically around one or more pillars:
| Area | What to Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Code Quality & Maintainability | How custom code, modules, and overrides are structured, whether they follow best practices, and how safely they can be upgraded or extended over time. |
| Performance & Stability | Bottlenecks affecting storefront and backend performance, including data-driven issues, indexing behavior, caching strategy, and operational load handling. |
| Security & Risk Exposure | Vulnerabilities related to custom code, third-party extensions, patch status, access control, and overall platform security posture. |
| SEO & External Visibility | Crawlability, indexing behavior, URL structure, redirects, and other factors that influence search visibility and external exposure. |
| Platform Governance & Complexity Management | How decisions around customizations, integrations, infrastructure, and automation are governed to prevent uncontrolled complexity and long-term risk. |
What a Comprehensive Platform Audit Evaluates
An Adobe Commerce audit typically examines selected layers of the platform stack, depending on the goals of the assessment. The objective is to understand how the system behaves under real conditions, where complexity is accumulating, and which areas may pose the highest risk to performance, stability, and future change:
Our Magento Site Audits can cover different business cases and scenarios. Contact us to get a proposal tailored to your needs.
1. Codebase and Customization Review
This layer examines how business logic is implemented and how safely it can evolve over time. In Magento environments, custom code often accumulates gradually as new requirements are introduced, sometimes without a clear architectural strategy.
An audit helps identify whether customizations follow Magento’s extensibility patterns or rely on fragile overrides. Poorly structured code can introduce hard-to-diagnose bugs, block upgrades, or create security risks such as improper input handling that may expose the platform to vulnerabilities like SQL injection or unauthorized data access.
- Custom modules and overrides
- Use of preferences, plugins, and observers
- Direct overrides of core Magento behavior
- Architectural patterns affecting extensibility
- Code quality and maintainability
- Compliance with Magento coding standards
- Duplication, dead code, and inconsistencies
- Areas likely to cause regressions during upgrades (technical debt)
- Core integrity
- Verification that Magento core files remain unmodified
- Identification of changes that could block patches or upgrades
2. Extensions and Dependency Footprint
Third-party extensions are a common source of hidden complexity in Adobe Commerce projects. While extensions can accelerate development, they also introduce external dependencies that are not always actively maintained or compatible with newer Magento or PHP versions.
An audit evaluates whether extensions are still necessary, supported, and appropriate for their role. Particular attention is paid to extensions that implement core business logic, as these can significantly increase operational risk, performance overhead, or upgrade friction over time.
- Extension inventory
- Number, role, and criticality of installed extensions
- Overlapping or redundant functionality
- Supportability and compatibility
- Unsupported or abandoned extensions
- Dependencies that block core Magento functionality or PHP upgrades
- Operational risk
- Extensions implementing core business logic
- Performance or security implications of third-party code
3. Infrastructure and Environment Configuration
Infrastructure choices have a direct impact on performance, stability, and security. Over time, hosting setups often evolve in response to traffic growth or feature changes, sometimes without revisiting original assumptions.
An audit reviews whether the platform’s infrastructure configuration aligns with current usage patterns. This includes evaluating caching layers, indexing behavior, queue processing, and environment parity, as well as identifying misconfigurations that can lead to downtime during traffic spikes or deployment failures.
- Hosting and scaling
- Server architecture and resource allocation
- Behavior under peak traffic conditions
- Caching, indexing, and queues
- Configuration of full-page cache, Redis, Varnish
- Indexer modes and cron execution
- Queue workers and async processing
- Environment consistency
- Differences between production, staging, and development
- Deployment and rollback readiness
- Security posture
- Patch status and vulnerability exposure
- SSL, access control, and credential policies
4. Performance and Operational Behavior
Rather than focusing solely on surface-level metrics, performance auditing aims to understand why the platform behaves the way it does under load. Many performance issues are not infrastructure-related but originate from data structure, indexing strategies, or inefficient queries introduced by custom logic.
An audit helps distinguish between symptoms and root causes, identifying whether slow page loads, admin lag, or checkout issues are driven by catalog complexity, cron behavior, logging practices, or underlying architectural decisions.
- Frontend and backend performance
- Data-driven performance issues
- Catalog structure, attribute usage, indexing behavior
- Query inefficiencies and database stress
- Monitoring and logging
- Error visibility and alerting
- Logging practices that affect performance or debugging
5. Frontend, Theme, and UX Implementation
The frontend layer often carries more responsibility than expected, especially in long-running Magento projects. Custom JavaScript, layout logic, or frontend-driven business rules can affect both performance and maintainability.
An audit assesses how the theme is structured, how assets are managed, and whether frontend logic introduces unnecessary coupling. This is particularly important when planning redesigns or modern frontend approaches, where legacy theme constraints can significantly increase effort.
- Theme architecture
- Rendering approach and layout complexity
- Custom frontend logic embedded in the theme
- Asset management
- JavaScript and CSS handling
- Image and media optimization
- Readiness for change
- Constraints for redesigns
- Compatibility with modern frontend approaches (e.g. Hyvä, headless)
6. Integrations and Data Flows
Integrations are among the most failure-prone areas of Adobe Commerce platforms because issues often surface outside the storefront. Data inconsistencies, delayed updates, or silent failures can impact operations long before customers notice a problem.
An audit evaluates how Magento exchanges data with systems such as ERP, PIM, OMS, analytics, and payment providers. This includes assessing ownership, monitoring, retry mechanisms, and whether integration failures are handled gracefully or propagate risk downstream.
- System integrations
- ERP, PIM, OMS, CRM, analytics, payment, fulfillment
- Marketplaces and third-party services
- Data ownership and monitoring
- Responsibility for data accuracy and failures
- Error handling and retry mechanisms
- Downstream impact
- Failures that affect operations rather than the storefront
- Latent issues that surface only at scale
7. SEO, Compliance, and External Exposure
Beyond internal performance, platforms interact continuously with search engines, third-party services, and external users. Structural changes, misconfigured redirects, or improper access controls can have long-term consequences on visibility and compliance.
An audit reviews how the platform exposes content and data externally, identifying SEO risks such as crawl inefficiencies or duplication, as well as security and regulatory considerations related to data handling and access control.
- Crawlability and indexing
- URL structure, redirects, sitemap health
- Robots and crawl budget considerations
- Search appearance
- Metadata, duplication risks, schema usage
- Compliance considerations
- Security, data handling, and regulatory exposure
8. Governance and Emerging Automation Layers
As Adobe Commerce ecosystems grow more complex, long-term stability increasingly depends on governance rather than individual fixes. Without clear standards, decisions around custom code, integrations, and infrastructure tend to accumulate technical debt.
- Platform governance
- Ownership models across code, infrastructure, and integrations
- Standards for introducing new functionality
- Automation and AI-assisted workflows
- Automated pricing, content, merchandising, or operations
- Traceability, reliability, and auditability of automated outputs
As Adobe Commerce ecosystems become more interconnected, audits are increasingly extending beyond static integrations. Emerging automation and AI-driven workflows, particularly those influencing pricing, merchandising, or operations, introduce additional considerations around governance, traceability, and reliability.
Taken together, these areas provide a factual baseline for understanding platform health and complexity before deciding whether to optimize, rebuild, or migrate.
When Should you Do a Magento Audit?
While audits can be valuable at any stage, they are particularly useful ahead of major platform decisions or periods of change. In these situations, assumptions about complexity, cost, or feasibility tend to break down without a clear baseline.
An Adobe Commerce audit is especially relevant when:
- Regularly as a Preventive Measure: To ensure compatibility as browsers and other software get updated. We recommend auditing your Magento site once or twice a year in most cases to catch potential issues early.
- After Experiencing Security Breaches: If your store has been attacked or you detect suspicious activity in your logs, an audit can help identify vulnerabilities and reinforce your security measures.
- Planning a Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration: Audits help identify upgrade blockers, legacy dependencies, and areas where rebuild effort will be concentrated before timelines and budgets are set.
- Preparing for major redesigns or re-architecture: Frontend changes often surface deeper backend constraints that are difficult to address mid-project without prior assessment.
- Addressing persistent performance or stability issues: Repeated fixes for speed, errors, or checkout issues are often symptoms of underlying structural problems that benefit from a broader review.
- Declining Conversions: When you notice a consistent decrease in transactions over time, it could be due to issues that have gone unnoticed. An audit can help uncover and address these problems.
- Establishing ongoing platform governance: For long-lived Adobe Commerce installations, periodic audits, normally once or twice a year, support more predictable upgrades, clearer ownership, and reduced operational risk.
In practice, audits are most effective when used as a foundation for future decisions, rather than as an end in themselves. They help teams move forward with a clearer understanding of trade-offs and constraints.
Check out TMO’s Customer Portfolio for successful Magento (Adobe Commerce) implementations, system upgrades, and optimization.
The Role of Governance in Long-Term Platform Stability
Many of the issues uncovered during an audit are not caused by individual technical decisions, but by the absence of clear governance over time. As platforms evolve, features are added, integrations expand, and responsibilities shift across teams. Without agreed standards and ownership, complexity accumulates quietly.
In Adobe Commerce environments, governance typically spans several areas:
- Code and customization governance: Defining how and where custom logic should be implemented, reviewed, and maintained to avoid fragile overrides or undocumented behavior.
- Extension and dependency management: Establishing criteria for introducing, updating, or retiring third-party modules so that functionality remains supportable across upgrades.
- Integration governance: Clarifying ownership, documentation, and monitoring of data flows between Magento and external systems such as ERP, PIM, OMS, analytics, and fulfillment platforms.
As integration landscapes grow more complex, governance is becoming increasingly important beyond traditional system connections. Many Magento setups now include automation or AI-assisted workflows that influence areas such as pricing, content generation, merchandising, or operational decisions. While these tools can add efficiency, they also introduce new dependencies and risks if not governed carefully.
Audits increasingly consider these emerging workflows as part of the broader integration landscape, focusing on traceability, data ownership, and reliability rather than the tools themselves.
Strong governance does not eliminate complexity, but it makes complexity visible and manageable. This, in turn, allows teams to plan upgrades, migrations, and optimizations with greater confidence.
Auditing your Magento 2 Site Performance with TMO
By conducting regular audits, you can ensure your Magento store remains competitive in the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape.
At TMO Group we specialize in conducting thorough Magento technical audits that provide a clear roadmap for optimizing your Adobe Commerce store. Our team of Adobe Commerce Certifications: What to look for when choosing a Partner AgencyIf you are outsourcing an eCommerce project on Adobe Commerce (Magento), here is an overview of the credentials a good business and development team should have.Adobe-certified experts will work closely with you to understand your business goals and tailor the audit to meet your specific needs, as well as help you implement the optimizations with our experienced development team if you choose to. Here’s what you can expect from our audit service:
- Detailed Technical Report: A comprehensive report outlining existing issues and recommended solutions.
- Actionable Insights: Clear, prioritized action items to improve your store’s performance, security, and SEO.
- Expert Guidance: Support from our experienced team to help you implement the recommended changes.
Ready to take your Magento Commerce store to the next level? Contact us today to schedule a Magento audit and discover how we can help you optimize your store for better performance, enhanced security, and increased conversions.
