Unwanted bugs, hazards, and problems on your website are always a source of concern. We understand that when we design a website, we want every aspect of it to be excellent, especially since a website should be developed with as little risk and faults as possible. This allows your website to run smoothly over time while also providing quality and assurance to your clients, allowing them to get the most out of your website.
Eliminating such undesired errors and malfunctions is critical for the firm’s website and working efficiently on the development part to make a positive impression in the market. As a result, we must choose and carry out an exceptional audit on our website, known as a “Code Audit.”
A website code audit is eventually required for minimizing risks and undesired problems, as well as boost security levels. Thus, auditing is a necessary step for every website to gain the attention of potential clients. We’ll go over the goal of a code audit and how it might help your website.
What is a Code Audit?
A code audit allows your company to examine the existing code of a project to identify issues based on where you are in the process. Auditors employ code review tools to identify malicious code and other issues that are currently creating difficulties, as well as those that may cause problems in the future.
A website code audit is a simple examination of the source code of your website or application, including the front- and back-end code, as well as the site architecture. The goal is to identify areas for improvement and assess the present risks and viability of the current solution. Regular code audits guarantee that your codebase is mature and solid, immediately disclosing any core problems or flaws.
The purpose is to conduct a website code audit and identify any obvious errors, inconsistencies, and potential sources of security breaches or violations of programming principles. We also check if it’s optimized for SEO, page speed performance, accessibility (which we can uniquely analyze), and other usability and best practice recommendations.
At the end, the website code audit is reviewed and compiled into a document that lists all of the detected concerns and suggested fixes from high-risk, medium-risk, and low-risk levels, as well as best practices for moving forward. This is an excellent opportunity for client teams to assess how well their software is ready to support and scale business needs over time.
How Code Audit is Important for Your Website?
There are no such things as static websites. Consider the effects of a major Google algorithm change on search engine optimization. The ripple effect of Google’s service enhancements will be visible on the websites itself. It’s possible that once-popular material is now underperforming. Even worse, it can slow down your website.
If your website gets a lot of visitors and questions, it can be tempting to think everything is fine. However, it’s possible that the site isn’t being utilized to its fullest capacity. If you don’t fix these problems, your site’s traffic and popularity will eventually slow down or even decline. Because of that, your rivals now have a chance to get ahead of you.
Audit Process Breakdown:
- Identifying the Goals: Before any auditing process, the first step is to identify the company’s goals. In this step, we need to concentrate on the aspects that require the most optimization and the issues to address. However, be sure to agree to a set process that delivers according to your company’s requirements.
- Assessment of the Architecture: The next step will be to conduct a project code review and record critical parts of the code structure. Before evaluating risks and prospective costs, we have to examine the code maintainability levels. The elements identified for evaluation include the frontend and backend, as well as containers, data planes, certificates, and adapters.
- Analysis of the Static Code: Static analysis tools make it easy for software engineers to test each project component. This detects code duplication and a slew of other potential security problems. CodeClimate, CSSLint, Pylint, RailsBestPractices, Reek, Rubocop, and other tools are necessary.
- Manual Checks: This stage is like the previous one. This instance serves as a safeguard against any potential flaws in the software’s operation. Because of developer’s experience and subjectivity, they also contribute significant insights.
- Scale & Infrastructure: Code can also contain errors. When this encounters a faulty infrastructure, the system functions may have scalability challenges. Application penetration testing, which detects weaknesses, is one solution. As a result, the source code locations are not revealed.
- Recommendations: At the end a plan of action is anticipated. Following the completion of the assessment, the audit should include any appropriate actionable steps. These might entail follow-up engagements such as refactoring or changes to ensure dependable code takeovers.
Reasons to Perform a Code Audit:
1. To Eliminate the Weak Points:
It is possible to find problems on any website, whether it is new or well-established. Results from code reviews can include the following:
- Locate any existing or future flaws;
- Determine which technologies are no longer supported;
- Learn everything you need to know about the technology stack to switch to a better piece of software.
2. To Ensure Scalability:
A business that intends to expand the distribution of its products in the future must plan and take precautions to avoid any problems. Therefore, the following might benefit from a code audit:
- Assessing the scalability of your software system;
- To handle more work;
- To adapt to new circumstances and prepare for future growth.
3. For Enhancing the Safety Standards:
The significance of keeping sensitive information safe is now widely understood. However, not all solutions can prevent data corruption and unauthorized access.
The safety of your website could be compromised by a poorly written codebase. The result could be theft of sensitive information, hacking, or identity theft. The onus of ensuring the safe operation of this code rests squarely on the shoulders of its creators.
4. For Better Maintenance:
Poor-quality code is a pain to keep up to date. There could be numerous problems, such as flaws, security holes, and other vulnerabilities. All of them are expensive and time-consuming to fix. It is challenging to update and expand a product for the future when it is built with outdated tools, incorrectly employed technology, and a cluttered code structure.
The risks and expenses associated with maintaining a product are reduced when the codebase is up to date with modern software development standards, security rules, and best practices.
What are the Main Benefits of Performing a Code Audit?
After learning about the steps involved in conducting a code audit and the justifications for doing so, you may be wondering what the main benefits of conducting a website code audit are.
The following are a few benefits of code audit that will help you understand why you should undertake an audit:
- Protecting your team’s code quality;
- Accelerating progress in the long run;
- Hazards like disused technology, poor architectural choices and performance bottlenecks are identified;
- Locating issues and weak spots in the security system;
- Finding problems with performance, maintainability, and scalability;
- Helping to automate and inspect processes for quality;
- Assisting you in avoiding technical debt;
- Aiding in the reduction of complexity and the elimination of roadblocks in the development process;
- Helping the team figure out how to handle legacy code and what should be updated or moved.
When is a Website Code Audit Beneficial?
As we read in the above paragraphs about the benefits of code audit, similarly here we will learn about when to have a code audit on your website.
1. Website is at Risk of Being Penalized by Search Engines:
Some established websites may have participated in or worked with SEO agencies that used ‘black hat’ SEO practices in the past, such as link farming, keyword stuffing, cloaking, or similar. All these strategies may have worked to boost ranks and traffic at the time, but websites who used them may now face penalties from search engines as their algorithms become cleverer.
A website code audit can discover and repair anything that could lead to a penalty before it happens, or it can correct the cause of a penalty if the site already has one.
2. Website is Taking an Excessive Amount of Time to Load:
People are impatient; if your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, you may expect a higher bounce rate, fewer pages per session, and a greater cart abandonment rate for e-commerce sites.
According to Google’s research, increasing the page load time from 1 second to 3 seconds raises the bounce rate by 32%. When it is increased to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%.
More importantly, Google understands that people are lazy and have indicated that site speed is a ranking factor, which means that websites that take longer to load may be pushed down in the SERPS.
You may evaluate your site speed with Google’s Page Speed Tool, which will provide you with information about the current level of optimization on your website.
3. A General Assessment for a Possible Investor:
Investors in your app will want to know the state of your code before they put money into it. You may show your end users and investors that your software is ready to roll out with the help of an audit. To impress the investor, you must first ensure that the code is of the highest quality possible.
4. Before a Product Launch:
The final stage of every project’s development is the application’s release. Poor code quality can leave your app vulnerable to hacking attempts and prevent it from running smoothly on all devices.
5. New Versions of iOS/Android are Released:
Each release of the React Native framework includes a document detailing which iOS and Android versions are compatible with that release. To keep up with the latest versions of iOS and Android, it may be necessary to upgrade to a newer version of React Native.
A comprehensive regression test suite should be run on the new OS version to ensure that all app features continue to function as expected and that there are no stability or performance issues.
5 Quick Tips for an Effective Audit:
- Start by establishing goals and making a checklist for reviewing code. All members of the team will be on the same page, and critical problems will be addressed and resolved.
- Website code audit analysis can only be optimized if both automated and human reviewers are put to use.
- Don’t engage in point-scoring with developers whenever an error is discovered. Instead, take advantage of the situation by establishing a robust and constructive security culture.
- If the development team has a lot of in-house expertise, they might not see problems that an outside code auditor would.
- Time can be saved by doing regular code audits. Putting it off till the last minute increases the likelihood of discovering a large number of logical problems and security flaws and delays the development process.
Therefore, every mature software development process, whether it is Agile or Waterfall-based, should include regular website audits. The quality, maintainability, and security of the product may all be managed with consistent efforts.
Types of Code Audits:
- Manual Code Review: Manual reviews ensure a comprehensive code audit. Experienced programmers can zero in on problematic lines of code and discover their origins with the help of this knowledge.
- Frontend Code Review: Problems with customer-facing solutions can be detected by inspecting the code at the front end. It also aids in making sure users have a consistent experience on desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone screens.
- Backend Code Review: Integrating with databases, micro services, and external providers all require codes to be properly tested for quality and performance.
- Security Review: As part of the security analysis, any potential loopholes in the code that hackers could exploit must be thoroughly examined. Software engineers often test for things like memory leaks, improper encryption, and hardcoded credentials.
- Infrastructure Review: Scalability, availability, and security are built into the foundation of the auditing software. In this step, we examine the cloud-based components of the program, such as the servers, data storage, and interaction services.
The Best Auditing Tools:
Code auditing is still an important job that can only be done by a human programmer. There is no substitute for the knowledge and expertise of a seasoned code auditor. Consequently, the effectiveness of code checks can be improved by including software tools in the code auditing pipeline.
The following are a few of the tools we utilize for code auditing.
- On GitHub, developers can request the assistance of reviewers before committing any changes to the main repository. Auditors can use it to examine the software’s structure, documentation, and implementation.
- In-depth dynamic security testing can be performed with the help of Code Sonar, a specialist tool. By inspecting the code for flaws, it aids applications in meeting strict standards.
- SonarQube does code analysis and gives code quality metrics to aid developers in efficiently fixing issues. It gives auditors useful feedback and lets them set up fundamental security policies.
- Synk is an auditing tool for analyzing code for vulnerabilities and dependencies. It’s simple to incorporate into existing cloud-based development processes, letting teams find and fix problems quickly.
- OWASP ZAP is a free and open-source web scanner used by security teams to locate application flaws. In addition, penetration testing is supported, in which security professionals attempt to breach the application’s defences in the same way as hackers would.
Code Audit Services by Cuneiform:
Below are the following auditing services delivered by Cuneiform Consulting for a better ranking of your website.
- Code Review: It finds errors and repairs them, boosts code quality, and keeps to coding standards so that the application runs smoothly.
- Security Audit: Security audits look for vulnerabilities, evaluate risks, and verify that security policies are being followed.
- Performance Analysis: Analyzing the efficacy of a system or app can help optimize its use of resources, boost its performance, and raise user satisfaction.
- Scale and Maintain: Services for creating websites offer scalability to meet expanding requirements, while making updates, bug fixes, and alterations simple to do in the future, reducing the amount of technological debt incurred.
- Documentation Review: All documents are cross checked for completeness, and accuracy during a code audit.
- Code Standards: Code audit standards are set to provide coding conventions, formatting guidelines, naming conventions, and other criteria to ensure code is consistent, readable, maintainable, and up to industry standards.
- Compliance Evaluation: To ensure security, data privacy, and other principles are met, an audit compliance review compares code to regulatory, legal, and industrial standards.
- Recommendations: Code auditing is a methodical process that examines code for bugs, security flaws, and proposed fixes.
A complete website code audit is a time-consuming job that necessitates coordination between your development and testing teams, as well as enough time to thoroughly evaluate the code throughout your systems. The payoff, however, is priceless: you assure that your ecommerce business is running smoothly and without any hidden mistakes or flaws.
An audit can also discover security flaws that might risk your sensitive data and the data of your consumers. Finally, a good audit guarantees that your code satisfies your own quality requirements and that any new code is as efficient as possible.
Cuneiform Consulting’s services are designed to address bugs and other issues on your website. Security, development, and managed services are also among our offerings. We can help you every step of the way through your digital journey, from project conception through successful launch and beyond.
