How often should a Shopify store be audited for accessibility?

Continuously, with alerts on change. A one-time audit is a snapshot that starts aging the moment the next theme update, app install, or content edit ships. The workable standard is a full scan on a weekly cadence, critical-page scans daily, and an immediate rescan whenever the storefront changes. What matters is that no regression survives more than a day undetected.

Why the quarterly audit model broke

E-commerce storefronts are not documents, they are software that ships every week. Theme vendors push updates, apps inject new markup overnight, and merchandisers edit sections without any developer involved. An audit from March says nothing about April. Plaintiff firms know this and scan repeatedly, catching stores in the window after a change broke something.

What change-triggered monitoring looks like

Every scan is diffed against your last clean baseline. When a theme publish or app update alters the markup, the affected templates get rescanned and the alert names the change that caused the regression. The blind window shrinks from a quarter to hours, and every event is logged, which builds the dated record that audits were supposed to give you.

How this fits a real team's week

Nobody has time to review a daily report. The alert model inverts it: silence means conformant, and a notification means something specific broke, here is the component, and here is the fix. Teams spend minutes on accessibility in a normal week and still hold a continuous evidence trail.