The auditing process is always personalized to the needs of each organization. It starts with a set of interviews carried out with several stakeholders of the project. The goal of this phase is to record the everyday experiences and pain points of the people involved in the running and usage of the Sitecore system. It helps us become more alert about specific problems and zero-in faster on possible solutions.
We proceed with several surface checks and then dive deeper into the points which seem to require higher attention.
-
System Architecture
Inspection of the different Sitecore server roles and the integration between them, including Authoring (Content Management), Publishing (Content Delivery), Databases and Indexing.
-
Availability
Ensuring that the system meets the desired Service Level including Load, Disaster Recovery, Backup.
-
Performance
Review of network infrastructure, server architecture, resource utilization, size and capacity. We use Microsoft’s Azure Insights and Google Page-Speed insights, both on the front-end and on the back-end to identify slow response times, unacceptable page-speed rankings, slow Time-To-First-Byte and/or Time-To-First-Contentful-Paint and/or Time-To-First-Meaningful-Paint, performance bottlenecks, long-running operations and other performance issues.
-
Integration
Inspection of the quality of connectivity of the Sitecore system with other third-party systems such as mail servers, enterprise service busses, remote web services, streaming servers, and other.
-
Sitecore Log Analysis
Inspection of the logs in order to identify possible hard errors and other underlying issues such as memory leaks, poor usage of caching and misused Sitecore behaviours caused by customizations applied during development or deployment time.
-
Configuration Analysis
Inspection of Sitecore’s Config files for possible misconfigurations.
-
Sitecore best practices
Check of the level of adherence to Sitecore’s performance tuning, security and hardening guidelines.
-
Data and Information Architecture audit
Review of the structure of data inside the Sitecore Content Management interface, of the choices made during the development of the project with regards to Information Architecture. Compliance check with the Sitecore Helix pattern. Identification of possible enhancements aimed at increasing performance and enabling better management of content by the Content Authors.
-
Users Roles and Workflows audit
Making sure that all content areas are assigned and are available only to the appropriate Content Authors, and that all content passes through the required authorization workflows before being published.
-
Publishing
Identifying any issues with incorrect and/or slow performing publishing.
-
Personalization Readiness
Check the ability to manage content through the Experience editor. We also perform trial runs of dummy personalization rules, A/B tests, of Sitecore, Profile Cards, Pattern Cards, Engagement Value Scoring and Automation Plans. We also verify that all personalization metrics are correctly recorded in the Sitecore Experience Database and appear in the Sitecore Analytics dashboards.
The complete Sitecore audit is a very well structured, detailed and objective report of the overall quality of the Sitecore solution, architecture and implementation. It contains a comprehensive list of the audited points, formal findings and actionable recommendations towards the remedy of each identified pain point. Each point is accompanied by all available artefacts which underline or prove the finding.
Each item is rated according to two measures. The first is its severity according to the technical and/or business impact and the second is the complexity of the required remedy actions based on the effort, time and required budget to resolve the issue. Finally, any interrelations, dependencies, prerequisites or blockers between remedy actions are also recorded.
The Audit Report allows you to get a clear understanding of the current state of the Sitecore environment, the improvement opportunities and the relative priority between identified issues. It also allows the creation of a clear path towards the remedy of all identified items, leading to a highly functional, well performing, stable, and scalable Sitecore installation.
Optimizing the Sitecore solution is the final, very important step of the Auditing & Optimization process. Although the report can be delivered to any Sitecore development team for execution, as an objective artefact, Linakis Digital is the most appropriate vendor to carry out the identified remedy points.
The optimization process uses the above report as its Scope. It starts with the creation of a detailed project plan which clearly lays out the tasks, their expected durations, the dependencies, the prerequisites, the involved parties, the human and other required resources and the expected result. With the plan in hand the execution of the remedy points takes place.
