When was the last time you conducted a Magento code audit on your website?
To be honest, even the most experienced developers cannot be sure that they will write free-bug codes all the time. Magento code review, therefore, is a necessary activity to check the overall code quality. So if you’re not actively taking advantage of it, then you’re missing out on identifying bugs and getting ideas that could make your code better.
Through the blog, let’s look at critical areas that your Magento code audit should reach out to detect problematic points that hurt the website.
I – What is Magento Code Audit?
Table of Contents
Magento code audit/review involves deep-diving into the website application’s source code to detect bugs/issues, security breaches, and violations of Magento coding standards.
In other words, this activity plays an integral part in your code health checkup of your coding to figure out or prevent possible risks that your Magento website may encounter. Importantly, this task helps you determine which areas result in those risks and give you the ideas on how to fix them.
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II – When Do You Need to Perform Magento Code Audit?
Magento code audit should be conducted frequently to ensure that a website is stable, scalable, and secure. Whenever you feel or see one of the following signs, don’t wait anymore to tell your developers to check the source code or hire Magento code audit service:
2.1 There’s a significant drop in sales
A drop in sales is such bad news to a merchant. This may be the result of many reasons originating from a bad experience on the site, for example:
- Some functions do not work as expected (in frontend or backend)
- Customers see interface errors in your site
The only way to verify where those issues come from is to dig into specific areas in the source code. For example, a Magento theme code issue can result in annoying errors with the website’s interface.
In a nutshell, many coding problems will manifest in the frontend that directly impacts the user experience. For this reason, store owners may find code audit a more regular activity once a website is launched into the market.
2.2 Your website suddenly crash
That’s awful! Nothing can be worse than a website crash. As you might have known or not, a website can crash because of some typical reasons. Except for the two first ones, it sounds possible to take control of the remaining. Thus, the two reasons are the way you should approach.
- Code errors
- Extension errors
- Virus attacks
- Hackers
- Service provider error
- Hosting error
- A spike of traffic
When you or someone else accesses your website and accidentally breaks the web code, your site may crash for the worst case. This can easily occur if somebody messes something up while they’re doing maintenance or updating the website. When unfortunately facing this accident, store owners and developers should keep calm and conduct an overall analysis of the source code to determine where the issue lies.
On the other hand, extension errors can be the result of mistakes in the customization process or violations of Magento coding standards. Then, Magento code audit becomes a critical step to confirm whether third-party modules have those problems.
2.3 Before/after important changes of the source code
Auditing the source code plays a vital role before making any change to your system, including maintaining, updating Magento versions, or migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Magento code review step helps you check whether the core code is kept intact or not. A small change in the core code may cause conflicts within and after you update or migrate your store.
Even when those processes are done, Magento code audit still comes in handy to make sure again that there’s no bug arising while changes are made.
2.4 You suspect security hacks
Security in the digital world is much more complicated than that in real life and challenging to control. Notably, ecommerce websites are always the top target of technology crime because of giant amounts of customer data. Whenever you see one of these signs, it may reveal that your site has been hacked:
- Your site displays weird code fragments at the top or bottom
- Your site is super slow or displays error messages
- You see the red screen of death when accessing your website
- You see a warning message saying the site contains malware
- Google Search Console notifies you about your website being hacked
- You see sudden traffic spikes
As soon as you realize any of those suspicious signs, you’d better conduct a Magento code audit to minimize possible risks and save your site.
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III – What Does Magento Code Review/Audit Involve?
3.1 General audit
# Javascript review
As you know, Javascript (JS) is a scripting language that can be used with HTML to create dynamic effects and interactions on web pages. In other words, this component is a client-side programming language. JavaScript features a noticeable downside: a single error may stop all of the scripts on your page from working.
Are you and your customers experiencing problems with the interactive functionality on your site? Move on to some killing problems resulted from JS errors that badly impact user experience:
- The flyout menus are broken
- The meta boxes do not drag
- The buttons become unclickable
The causes may come from JavaScript errors or conflicts. Javascript review is about checking if there is any JS error from the browser console.
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# Determining unnecessary files
When you go for the Magento 2 Code Audit Service, the experts will help point out the redundant files within the main code folder. Once all of those files are removed, your website will become lighter and faster.
3.2 Core integrity
The purpose of Magento core integrity is to check whether your website is edited/hacked or not.
Why is this so important?
Magento captures its native code in the app/code/core and lib/ folders. There are various ways to override or adjust the functionality in these directories without modifying the code directly. Changes in the Magento core can deeply affect your site’s security, functionality, and upgrade processes in the future as well. For instance, when it comes to a version upgrade, all of those changes will be overwritten or lost forever.
Changes in Magento core can arise when you customize a functionality, change or add new features. This is quite risky so it should only happen in case of temporary adjustments during development. In any other situation, you’d better build a Magento extension for additional features without interfering with Magento core.
That’s why you need Magento core integrity to ensure that those tasks are implemented without damaging the Magento core by checking all the overrides and comparing the previous core and the new files.
3.3 Module code audit
In reality, an online store usually requires more features than what the default Magento initially supports. Accordingly, store owners can purchase tailor-made modules from third parties or use self-customized ones. Whatever choice you make, the additional modules are totally different from the default. Because of this reason, you cannot make sure that they will actually work with your store.
Module code audit is an integral part of Magento code audit to review if third-party or self-customized modules follow Magento coding standards and are compatible with your store. These are two imperative conditions so that a module can work as expected on your website.
3.4 Theme code audit
Like Magento modules, Magento theme is another area that Magento code audit should cover. If you do not use the default Magento theme but a customized or a ready-made one for your store, it’s crucial to verify whether it satisfies Magento coding standards? If not, you cannot imagine all possible interface issues that a code error can result in.
To discover what theme your store is currently using from the backend, visit Store > Configuration > Design and look for the current theme.
MORE THAN CODING: Let’s Magento 2 Website Maintenance experts help out with further problems even not related to your code!
Bottom Lines
For those who have difficulty auditing the Magento code, don’t hesitate to contact BSS Commerce for a free consultation. And of course, it would be an honor for us to serve you with our Magento 2 Code Audit Service. Our experts will audit your site in all of the mentioned areas and return a detailed report of bugs and Magento coding standards’ violations.
Over the years of working with online merchants worldwide, not only Code Audit but many of our Website Development Services have proven their reliability with high-rated support within the Magento user community. A quick look for those services will not take you much time.
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