What Is a UX Audit? Baymard's Expert-Led UX Audits Explained

If your website or app isn’t performing the way it used to, whether that’s a drop in conversions, rising bounce rates, or user complaints, the issue almost certainly lies in your user experience.

A UX audit is a focused, systematic review that helps you identify the usability issues that are holding your site back. It gives you a detailed overview of what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change, all backed by real data and UX best practices.

More than just a checklist, a good UX audit helps you prioritize the most critical issues that impact performance. A great audit should give you clear guidance on where to focus your resources, how your UX compares to competitors, and what changes are likely to have the biggest impact.

And if your internal UX resources are already stretched, an audit can augment your efforts with specialist support and insights, helping your team move faster and with more confidence.

In this post, we’ll break down what a UX audit involves, why it matters, and how you can drive meaningful results for your business with an expert-led UX audit by the Baymard team.

Let's dive in.

What Is a UX Audit?

A UX audit is a structured evaluation of your website or app, designed to uncover usability issues that may be hurting performance. It’s based on established UX research and helps teams understand where users are struggling — and why.

Take an e-commerce store selling luxury watches. Every day, potential customers browse the site, moving from the homepage to category listings, then onto individual product pages. One of them finds the perfect watch, adds it to their cart, and starts the checkout process. But somewhere along the way, they drop off without completing the purchase.

When this pattern shows up repeatedly in your data, it raises an important question: is something in the user experience stopping people from buying?

The challenge is that these issues are often hard to spot internally. You may not know whether you’re facing a major UX flaw or just a small point of friction — or where in the journey the problem actually lies.

A UX audit helps answer those questions. It pinpoints the exact areas where users are getting stuck and provides clear, actionable recommendations to resolve them.

The result is a smoother, more intuitive experience that leads to better engagement, higher satisfaction, and improved conversion rates. For many companies, a UX audit becomes an essential step in the optimization process — guiding design, development, and business decisions with confidence.

What Happens During a UX Audit?

A UX audit involves a detailed review of your site or app, where usability experts evaluate key parts of the user journey — from navigation and search, to product pages, forms, and checkout.

The process combines a range of tools and research methods to identify where users are running into friction. This includes reviewing page layouts, interaction patterns, mobile responsiveness, and content hierarchy, as well as technical elements that impact the user experience.

A key part of most audits is benchmarking. This means comparing your site’s UX performance against industry standards, best practices, and competitor experiences. These benchmarks help you understand not just where issues exist, but how your experience stacks up in the market and where the biggest opportunities lie.

Unlike usability testing, which observes real users interacting with a live interface, a UX audit takes a systematic, expert-driven approach based on proven research. The two can work together — testing reveals how users behave, while auditing explains why the issues occur and how to fix them.

The final output is a set of prioritized, actionable recommendations that can guide your design and development work, along with benchmarks you can continue to track over time.

What Are the Benefits of a UX Audit?

UX audits provide clear, tailored recommendations to improve the usability and performance of your website or app. Whether you're optimizing a live product or preparing for a redesign, it's a powerful way to uncover hidden friction and guide smarter decisions.

Think of it as a health checkup for your digital product, a chance to spot weak points, sharpen your competitive edge, and make meaningful improvements backed by research.

What About the Limitations of UX Audits?

The costs involved in a complete professional site audit can be significant, so it’s not a good fit for every company. You must communicate your goals with auditors and discuss the best ways to get the highest return on investment from the review process.

A good auditor will help you prioritize the recommendations they make, but the amount of data that comes back from the audit process can initially be overwhelming or disheartening.

An audit might not be the perfect solution for you if you’re under a tight development schedule. It takes time to perform a comprehensive user experience site audit.

What Does a UX Audit Determine?

One primary way of conducting UX audits is a heuristic evaluation. Heuristics is an approach to problem solving that uses experimental or practical ways to produce solutions.

During a heuristic evaluation, your auditors will put themselves in the shoes of your users and go through the website or app as if they were the user.

They will take notes and capture screenshots as they attempt various tasks, so they note every challenge a user would encounter. This process is often based on pre-set usability heuristics.

After the audit is complete, reviewers compile findings and provide an overview of the data, giving recommendations for improving the UX to improve conversions.

For example, usability testing could show that customers hesitated to input their credit card information because the checkout UX was difficult or they didn't feel their transaction was secure. In that case, the auditor might recommend adding trust signals like security badges.

Transform Your UX with an Expert-Led Audit from the Baymard Team

How does your website's UX performance stack up to the competition? What are your 40 most important UX improvements? Baymard UX audits empower your organization with actionable insights drawn from over 150,000 hours of research.

Discover the top industry-specific UX improvements for your site and benchmark your UX against industry leaders and competitors today! The best part? If you don't see a positive ROI then your audit is completely free!

Here are the different pieces of the audit analysis, deliverables, and costs:

A Full UX Analysis and Assessment

UX experts from Baymard will perform an unbiased analysis of your site, documenting its UX performance across 500 unique parameters, and comparing your UX performance to leading e-commerce sites across those metrics.

Your UX analysis and assessment cover both desktop and mobile websites, including:

• The homepage
• Category navigation
• On-site search
• Product detail pages
• Product lists and filtering
• Checkout process
• “My account” section

Detailed 120+ Page Report

After the comprehensive audit, you will receive a detailed 120+ page report with 40 research-backed suggestions for improving your site and increasing conversions. Recommendations will cover visual design, responsive design, content clarity and more.

Each suggestion includes a description of the user experience issue, along with a proposed solution and 1 to 4 best practice implementation examples from sites leading in the ecommerce world.

UX Scorecards

After the review and the report are complete, auditors will provide 7 detailed UX scorecards for your site, based on 500+ UX performance scoring parameters against competitors among the 214 top-grossing U.S. and European e-commerce sites. You can use the insights on these scorecards to improve your website.

These scorecards provide comparison scores on:

• Homepage and category navigation
• Search experience
• Product list and filtering
• Product detail pages
• Checkout processes
• Customer account
• Mobile-specific issues

Audit Discussion and Implementation

When your entire audit is complete, Baymard's audit team will schedule a 2-hour video conference to walk through the results with your team and provide details about the research and findings of the auditors.

After the audit walkthrough video conference, you’ll get follow-up calls with your UX auditors so you can ask additional questions about implementation, or get feedback on redesigns or prototypes your team creates.

How Much Does a UX Audit Cost?

Our audits start from $21,000. We offer both audits for your site and for competitor sites covering a range of verticals and industries. Head over to our UX audit services page to find out exactly what we have on offer.

The best part? If you don't see a positive ROI then your audit is completely free!

How Can a UX Audit Improve Conversion?

Even minor conversion rate improvements can make a significant difference in website sales, leading to a high return on investment for your UX review.

For example, an improvement from 3.1% to 3.6% in conversion rate for a site with $50,000,000 annual sales will yield $8,060,000 in extra sales every year.

On average, businesses report a $100 ROI out of $1 invested in their user experience.

Work with a UX Audit Expert Team to Improve User Experience and Usability for Your E-Commerce Site

Baymard's UX Audit Team can help you uncover usability issues with a full-site UX audit. Our audit services are most commonly used by:

• Sites that would like to benchmark their UX performance to see how they stack up against major competitors and other leading websites
• Sites that would need inspiration and verification of their new redesign
• Optimized e-commerce sites that want to bring in a pair of external and unbiased eyes to identify final tweaks and improvements
• Agencies, designers, and tech vendors that want reassurance that they’re on the right track with their client’s e-commerce design

Want to find out more or speak to an auditor? Book your audit call here today.