Most e-commerce stores leak money in the same five places
After 25 years working on online stores, the pattern is boring and consistent. Page weight kills mobile conversion. Lazy-loaded images without dimensions trash LCP. Third-party scripts that the marketing team installed two years ago and nobody owns blow up TBT. Checkout funnels lose 40 percent of mobile buyers between cart and payment. Schema is half-implemented, search visibility is half what it should be. Owners know something is wrong but their current developer either shrugs at it or quotes a $50K rebuild.
The free audit finds the specific leaks on your specific store, with numbers attached — not "your site is slow" but "your homepage LCP is 4.2 seconds, you're losing roughly 18 percent of mobile visitors before content paints, here's the four files causing it." That report is yours to keep whether you hire us or not. Most owners forward it to their existing dev and get fixes for free. Some look at it and decide they want the person who wrote it to handle the fixes. Either outcome is fine.
The ladder above is built to remove the awkward "what does it cost" conversation. Free is free. $2,500 is $2,500. The fix sprint floor is $8,000 because below that, nobody's site has enough leverage to justify the engagement. The retainer floor is $5,000 per month because at less than that, we can't do the depth of work that actually moves your numbers.
Pricing
Each step stands alone. Take the free audit and never come back — that's fine, you still got something useful. Or work through all four and end up on the retainer. No tier is gated by the one before it, but most clients walk the ladder in order because each step builds on the last.
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, CLS measured on real traffic via CrUX
- Lighthouse synthetic baseline: performance, SEO, accessibility, best practices
- Mobile vs desktop split with specific failing pages flagged
- Schema coverage audit (which page types are missing JSON-LD)
- Top 5 specific issues found, ranked by estimated revenue impact
- Honest opinion on whether you have a real problem worth fixing
- Everything in the free audit, expanded to a written 15-to-25 page report
- Manual checkout walkthrough with conversion blockers identified
- Competitive teardown vs your top 3 competitors (performance + UX)
- Prioritized 90-day fix roadmap with effort estimates
- 90 minute strategy call to walk through findings live
- This fee credits against the fix sprint if you book one within 30 days
- We ship the fixes the audit identified, ranked by leverage
- Typical scope: Core Web Vitals, schema, checkout, 1 to 2 conversion blockers
- Fixed scope, fixed price — quoted from your $2,500 audit findings
- Staging environment, your QA, before/after metrics on close-out
- Ranges $8K (single platform, scoped) to $15K (multi-platform, complex)
- Most fixes ship to production before the engagement ends
- Monthly performance + conversion review with written report
- ~20 hours per month of implementation work on agreed priorities
- Direct Slack or email access for the operational stuff in between
- Quarterly competitive teardown and roadmap refresh
- Schema + AEO maintenance as platforms and AI engines evolve
- First-look on emergent issues (Core Update impact, etc.) without rushing
The audit looks at seven things, not just speed
"Site speed" is what most agencies sell because Lighthouse scores are easy to screenshot. The actual leaks are usually elsewhere. Here's what the real audit covers:
- Core Web Vitals on real traffic. CrUX field data, not lab synthetic. LCP, INP, CLS measured against actual visitors over the last 28 days. Synthetic Lighthouse alongside for backstop.
- Mobile conversion friction. Manual walkthrough of cart, address, payment, confirmation. Where are buyers actually dropping out? Touch targets, form field count, payment options visible above fold.
- Checkout funnel completeness. Apple Pay / Google Pay / Shop Pay / Express checkout present? Guest checkout available? Address autocomplete working? Order summary collapsing on mobile?
- Schema and AEO posture. JSON-LD coverage by page type. Product, BreadcrumbList, Organization, FAQPage. AI bot allowlist status at the CDN. Where are AI engines currently citing you (or not)?
- SEO health. Indexable page count vs Google Search Console actual index. Sitemap accuracy. Canonical tag errors. Title and description coverage on top revenue pages.
- Third-party script bloat. Every tag, what loads it, what it costs in render time. Most stores have 8 to 15 scripts they haven't audited since launch.
- Hosting and platform fit. CDN configuration. Image CDN settings. Mobile network simulation. Whether your platform is the actual bottleneck or just the convenient scapegoat.
You get the full output of the free audit by email within 48 hours of submitting your URL. No call required. No upsell pitch — if there's nothing worth fixing, the report will say so.
The Process
The whole point of the ladder is that you control where to stop. Most engagements move at this pace:
- Day 0 — Request the free audit. Send your URL via the contact form or book a call. No credit card, no account, no friction. We queue your audit for the cron.
- Day 1 to 2 — Free audit lands in your inbox. PDF report with the top 5 issues found, real-traffic Core Web Vitals data, and an honest assessment. Read it on your own time. No follow-up nag.
- Day 3 to 14 — If the audit hits, book the strategy call. $2,500. 90 minutes live. We walk through findings, you ask questions, we agree on whether a fix sprint makes sense. You leave with the written 90-day roadmap regardless.
- Day 14 to 35 — Fix sprint, if scoped. 2 to 3 week engagement. Fixed scope, fixed price (quoted from the audit). We ship to staging, you QA, we move to production. Before/after metrics on close-out.
- Day 35-plus — Retainer, if it makes sense. Month to month, 60 day notice either direction. Most clients land here within 60 days of the first audit.
The whole ladder is engineered so you can exit at any rung without an awkward conversation. The free audit is genuinely free. The $2,500 audit fee credits against the fix sprint. The fix sprint is fixed-scope, fixed-price. The retainer is month-to-month. No 12-month contracts. No exit fees. No "but you need to talk to someone in sales."
FAQ
Actually free. You submit your URL, we run the audit through the same pipeline we use for everything else, and the report lands in your inbox within 48 hours. No credit card. No follow-up call required. If you read it and never come back, that's fine. We're not paying for the audit itself — it's a small marginal cost on infrastructure we're already running. The math works because a small percentage of audit recipients eventually book a paid engagement, and the audit itself is the most accurate filter for whether someone is a fit.
Because below $8,000, the engagement isn't deep enough to move your revenue numbers. A $1,500 "tune-up" that swaps out three plugins doesn't change anything you can measure. The fix sprint floor is set where the work is meaningful enough to be worth your attention and ours. If your store is too small for that floor to make sense (less than roughly $500K in annual revenue), the audit may still be useful, but we'll tell you upfront that we're probably not the right fit for the paid work.
Yes. About a third of retainer clients skip the fix sprint entirely — they took the audit, agreed with the findings, and want ongoing optimization rather than a one-shot intervention. Other clients run a fix sprint, see results, then move to retainer for compounding work. Both paths work. The ladder is a default sequence, not a forced one.
Primarily Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento (Adobe Commerce), and WooCommerce. We've also worked on custom Node and PHP stacks and headless setups with Next.js or Astro fronting a headless commerce backend. If you're on a platform not in that list, send the URL anyway — the audit work itself is platform-agnostic, only the fix sprint depends on platform fit.
Most are. The free audit is a tool they can use directly — we're not trying to replace them, we're giving them ammunition. About half of audit recipients forward the report to their existing dev and get the fixes done in-house. That's a fine outcome. The clients who hire us for the fix sprint usually do so because the issues identified are outside their dev's specialty (Core Web Vitals optimization, schema architecture, AEO) or because their dev's plate is already full.
No. The retainer is month-to-month with 60 days notice either direction. That's it. If you stop seeing value, give 60 days notice and we wrap up cleanly. No exit fees, no penalties, no "we'll need to talk to retention." Same applies in reverse — if we can't deliver value at the agreed scope, we'll tell you and we wind down.
Fix sprint results are usually visible within 30 days of go-live. Core Web Vitals improvements show up in CrUX field data after 4 to 6 weeks (Google's rolling 28-day average smooths things). Conversion rate improvements depend on traffic volume — high-traffic stores see signal in 7 to 14 days, lower-traffic stores need 30 to 60 days for statistical confidence. SEO and AEO improvements compound over 3 to 6 months. Anyone promising overnight gains is selling you something else.