Source code review for websites, webshops, and apps

Our source code review provides you an objective opinion on the source code of your website, webshop, or app. You’ll get a comprehensive report of all the issues we find, along with recommendations on how to fix them.

We do source code reviews for WordPress, Magento, Umbraco, apps, and other PHP- and .NET-based systems only. This is because these are the systems that we develop for and thus have an in-depth technical understanding about. If we evaluate technical work done on a system or framework we don’t have mastery of, the result will be questionable.

You can avail of our source code review as a standalone package, or mix and match it with our other review packages (Technical audit, SEO and speed audit, and UI/UX review) for a more holistic review of your site or system.

Here’s what we do when we review your website, webshop or app source code. (To get an idea on how to get started, check out our general site review process.)

To do a software review we will either need full access to your system and its source code (i.e., source code repository like GitHub, etc.) or, if you prefer not to give us access to that, then we need to be able to access a copy i.e. through download from a staging site or transfer using Dropbox or a similar service.

For this type of review, we will do the following:

1. We do an in-depth review for the parts of your site’s code that directly affect your goals. (For example, if you have slow loading issues, we check the parts of the code that affect the website speed.)
2. We check if your source code follows best practices.
3. We check if the code is ‘spaghetti code’ (i.e., if it’s unstructured or difficult to understand).
4. We check if your source code is readable and easy to edit.
5. We check if your source code is maintainable in case you want to transition to another developer in the future.
6. We check if the core code of the CMS or framework has been modified.
7. For websites or webshops, we check if you are using a commercial theme and if so, if the original code of the theme has been modified.
8. We check if the code of the plugins you have installed have been substantially modified.
9. We check if there are functionalities that are made into a plugin that could have been coded into the theme instead.
10. We check for issues in the parts of the code affecting third-party integrations.
11. We also check for possible vulnerabilities. (Note, however, that we are not a security company and therefore will not be able to do a full security audit of your code.)
12. We check if the code and/or the database are well-documented.
13. We check if there is a proper code change log for the project.
14. We check if the developers have applied coding standards for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, or .NET, such as:

• Code demarcation standards
• Naming conventions
• Style guide
• Acceptable syntax and semantics
• Formatting standards (e.g., indentation, line length, use of parentheses, braces, and semicolons)
• Inline code documentation

Note: One system may have a million lines of code, so we will not be doing a line by line audit, instead we’ll do a general review.

At the end of the review, we provide you with a document compiling all our findings as well as our recommendations on how to fix them and suggestions for further optimization based on best practices and our own experience with development projects.

After the review, we can also have a meeting with you or your developers to discuss and run through the items we found during our review.

You are free to take this report to your own developer or another company, or you can choose to have our development team fix the issues for you.

Contact us today and see how we can help.