How often should a Shopify store re-run a full accessibility audit?

Re-run a full accessibility audit quarterly if the store changes regularly, and immediately after any theme change, redesign, or major app install. Between audits, continuous monitoring catches the drift that content updates and app changes introduce week to week. Once a year, add a manual audit with keyboard and screen reader testing, because automated scans miss the issues that matter most to real users.

Automated monitoring is the floor, not the audit

A weekly automated scan is table stakes for a store that publishes new products, runs promotions, or installs apps. It catches the mechanical issues: missing alt text, contrast failures on new banners, broken heading order on new templates. But an automated scan is not an audit. It checks the code against rules, and rules miss the human experience of actually using the store.

Treat monitoring as the smoke alarm and the audit as the fire inspection. You would not replace inspections with smoke alarms. Run both.

Quarterly full audits match how stores actually change

For most Shopify brands, a quarterly cadence is the sweet spot. Themes get updated, apps get installed, seasonal campaigns ship new templates, and content teams turn over. Each quarter introduces enough change that a fresh audit finds real issues. More frequent full audits tend to re-find the same backlog, which teaches the team to ignore audit reports.

The exception is the event-driven audit. Redesign, theme migration, checkout extension changes, and new market launches each deserve a full audit regardless of the calendar. If your last quarterly audit was two weeks before the redesign, the redesign audit is not a duplicate. It is the one that matters.

The annual manual audit catches what tools cannot

Once a year, pay for or perform a manual audit: keyboard-only navigation of the full purchase path, screen reader testing on the key templates, and a review of the issues automated tools flag as "needs review." Manual testing consistently finds the high-severity issues that scanners miss, like a checkout flow that is technically labeled but practically unusable, or a focus order that jumps around the page in a way no rule catches.

The annual manual audit is also your legal evidence. If a demand letter arrives, a recent manual audit with a remediation log is the strongest artifact a brand can produce. Automated scan history supports it, but the manual audit is the headline.

Make the cadence a policy, not a reminder

Audits that depend on someone remembering to schedule them do not happen. Write the cadence into the store's operating policy: weekly automated scans, quarterly full audits, event-driven audits after defined triggers, annual manual pass. Assign the owner and the calendar. The stores with the best accessibility records are not the ones with the best tools. They are the ones where the audit happens whether or not anyone feels like it.

Turn the audit report into a sequenced backlog

An audit report with two hundred findings and no order is a document, not a plan. Sequence the backlog by user impact first: checkout and cart blockers before footer contrast, keyboard traps before decorative alt text. Within each tier, order by fix cost: template-level fixes that clear dozens of instances go before one-off page fixes.

Assign every finding an owner and a date, and re-scan after each batch of fixes lands. The re-scan is what turns remediation into evidence. A brand that can show the finding, the fix, and the clean re-scan for each issue has a compliance story that writes itself.