Free audit tools will tell you your site is fast and your tags are tidy. Neither of those is why people aren't buying. Here's what a real audit looks at.
Run your store through a free audit tool and you'll usually get a number out of 100 and a list of technical items. Compress your images. Add alt text. Reduce render-blocking JavaScript.
All correct. None of it tells you why people aren't buying.
What the free tools actually check
Three tools cover most of what merchants run, and it's worth being precise about what each one does, because they're all good at their jobs and none of their jobs is the one you have.
Google PageSpeed Insights measures how fast your page loads and gives you a performance score plus a list of technical fixes. It's free, it's accurate, and it's the right tool for diagnosing why a page is slow. It has no opinion whatsoever about whether your product page can sell anything. A page can score 100 with the price below the fold, no sizing information, and shipping cost hidden until checkout.
Shopify's web performance dashboard reports Core Web Vitals from real visits: loading, interactivity, visual stability. Better than a lab score because it's your actual customers. Still purely about speed. Shopify retired the old speed score in 2024 and replaced it with this, which was the right call, and it still stops at the same line.
HubSpot's Website Grader checks, in its own words, speed and SEO. It gives you a score and a report. Useful as a first look at whether anything is badly wrong technically.
Notice the pattern. All three answer is this page technically sound. None of them answers is this page losing me money, and where.
That's not a criticism of the tools. It's the category. Technical auditing is a solved, commoditized problem and you should absolutely run one of these. Just don't expect it to explain a 1.2% conversion rate.
What a good audit checks instead
Five things. If an audit doesn't do these, it's a technical scan wearing a different name.
One: it looks at the storefront the way a buyer does. On a phone, at 375 pixels wide, in the order a real person moves through the store. Home page, product page, cart. Most audits get run on a 27-inch monitor where everything looks fine. It usually does.
Two: every check has a bar you either clear or you don't. "Improve your trust signals" is not a finding, it's a mood. "The add-to-cart button is 32 pixels tall, below the 44-pixel bar, and it disappears when you scroll past the buying block" is a finding. Two people checking the same store should get the same answer. If they can argue about it, it isn't a check.
Three: it ranks by money, not severity. A list of forty problems sorted by a red-amber-green label is a to-do list nobody starts. Findings need to be ordered by what each one is plausibly costing, so the first thing on the list is the first thing worth doing.
Four: it covers the surfaces where money actually leaks. Home page failures are a positioning problem. Product page failures are a persuasion problem, and that's where most sales are lost. Cart failures are friction, and they're the cheapest to fix. An audit that only looks at one surface tells you a third of the story.
Five: it happens more than once. Storefronts drift. A theme update reverts your sticky add-to-cart, an app injects a banner, a seasonal hero pushes the price below the fold. The failures that cost you money are usually recent ones nobody noticed. A snapshot from March is a historical document by June.
That's the standard. It's also the standard we built Qosmic against, so here's the part where we talk about ourselves.
The Qosmic audit
Drop in your URL. No install, no code, no access to your admin.
Qosmic was built against the five criteria above, because they're the ones that were missing everywhere else.
It reads your live storefront the way a buyer does, on mobile and desktop, and runs five hundred checks across every page on your store. Each check has a specific pass bar, the same one every time, so the result is reproducible rather than an opinion.
It ranks what it finds by what each failure is plausibly costing you, so you get an ordered list rather than a wall of red.
It reads your numbers alongside the storefront. GA4, Hotjar and Klaviyo, not just Shopify, so a finding on your product page sits next to the drop-off it explains.
It benchmarks you against stores in your segment, because a 2% conversion rate means something different for furniture than for supplements.
And then it does the part audit tools historically don't: it writes the fix. Describe what you want, or take the recommendation, and it builds the change inside your own theme using your own components, then stages it as a draft. Nothing goes live until you approve it. Nothing on your store changes without you.
That last part is the whole reason Qosmic exists. Detection has been a solved problem for years. Every merchant we talk to has a spreadsheet of things they know are broken. The gap between knowing and shipping is where conversion work actually dies, and closing it is worth more than a better report.
What it costs
Nothing. The audit is free. Not a trial that expires in fourteen days, not free-with-a-card, not free until we decide otherwise. Run it as often as you like.
It only reads your store. Qosmic doesn't need admin access to run the audit, and it doesn't change anything on its own. Every fix is a draft you approve before anything goes live.
How to run it
- Paste your store URL. Nothing to install.
- Wait a couple of minutes while it walks the store on mobile.
- Read the ranked list, starting at the top.
- Fix the first three yourself, or have it draft them for you.
- Run it again after any theme update, app install or seasonal redesign.
The last one matters more than people expect. A rough audit every month beats a beautiful one every year, because the expensive failures are almost always recent.
The short version
Free audit tools check whether your site is technically sound. Run one. PageSpeed Insights is free and good.
None of them check whether your store can sell, because that's a different question and a harder one.
A real audit walks the storefront on a phone, uses bars instead of adjectives, ranks findings by money, covers all three surfaces, and runs again next month.
Ours does that, free, and then writes the fix and waits for you to approve it.
And if you only take one thing from this: go and complete your own checkout, on your phone, on cellular, with a real card. Most merchants never have. You'll find something in ten minutes.
