WooCommerce security audit
A store is not a brochure site with a cart bolted on. It moves money, stores customer personal data, runs privileged roles, and depends on a stack of payment, shipping, and marketing extensions. This audit reviews the WooCommerce store as the commercial system it is — from checkout scripts to recovery of order data.
Never send credentials, private keys, backup archives, or confidential source code through this website.
What you receive
Controlled cross-site read and write between sites sharing one account.
One compromised site can reach the files and configuration secrets of three others.
Move each site into its own hosting account and PHP-FPM identity, with separate deployment and database credentials.
Open — staging migration passed; production separation still outstanding.
| Finding | Final disposition |
|---|---|
| VPS-01 · Root SSH password access | Resolved Acceptance checks passed |
| WP-01 · Public events backup | Resolved Acceptance checks passed |
| HOST-01 · Shared filesystem identity | Open Staging passed, production due 2 October |
| INFO-01 · Public version metadata | Accepted Named approver, review due 22 December |
From the 22-page sample report, a fully fictional worked example. Read the whole report
Why stores are different
Attackers treat WooCommerce differently because the payoff is different. A compromised brochure site serves spam; a compromised store can leak customer records, skim payment details at checkout, redirect completed-order traffic, farm coupon and refund abuse, or quietly harvest the credentials of returning customers.
The store also carries obligations a brochure site does not: customer personal data under privacy law, payment-brand requirements flowing through the gateway, and the commercial reality that even an hour of broken checkout is measurable lost revenue. The audit is scoped around those stakes.
In the ClickFix incident documented in our published report, WooCommerce sites were among the 30+ compromised — with fake verification panels interrupting shopping journeys at exactly the moment customers were asked to trust the site most.
Scope
Everything in the WordPress security audit is included; these are the store-specific layers on top.
Gateway configuration, checkout page scripts and third-party tags, injected-skimmer exposure, HTTPS integrity, and what actually touches payment data in this store.
Customer, shop manager, and custom role boundaries; account takeover exposure on login, registration, and password recovery; session handling for returning buyers.
Payment, shipping, tax, marketing, and analytics plugins; stored API keys and webhooks; the vulnerability exposure and update posture of each commercial extension.
Where personal data lives and leaks — order exports, logs, email content, admin screens, staging copies — and who can reach it.
Coupon and discount abuse, price and cart manipulation, refund and stock workflows, and subscription or membership entitlement boundaries.
Backup and restoration readiness for a dataset that changes with every order, staging discipline, update workflow, and incident contacts.
Payment security, honestly
Most WooCommerce stores offload card handling to a hosted gateway, which keeps raw card data off the server. That reduces scope but does not remove risk: a compromised checkout page can still skim card details in the browser before the gateway ever sees them, which is why checkout-script integrity is part of this audit.
This engagement is an independent security audit, not a PCI DSS assessment by a Qualified Security Assessor. It supports the security controls behind a self-assessment questionnaire and will say clearly which requirements it does and does not evidence — an honest boundary an insurer or acquirer can rely on.
Method
Identify peak trading windows, the gateway and fulfillment integrations, test-order rules, and what must never be touched — before any access is exchanged.
Review external exposure and approved internal controls, using test accounts and agreed test orders. Potential issues are manually verified before they are reported.
Findings are ranked by what they mean for this store — checkout integrity first, data exposure second, hardening opportunities after — with the responsible party named.
Implement agreed fixes directly or support your developer, then retest the affected behavior — including a checkout walk-through — and update the report.
Common questions
No. It is an independent security audit that strengthens and evidences the controls behind your gateway setup and self-assessment. It does not replace a QSA assessment where one is required, and the report states that boundary explicitly.
Yes. Trading windows, test-order rules, and prohibited actions are agreed during scoping, and nothing destructive is performed. Most of the review is observational; anything interactive uses agreed test accounts.
Yes, when they are in scope. Recurring billing, entitlement boundaries, and cancellation flows are reviewed as business logic, since that is where stores quietly lose money.
It follows the WordPress security audit range of $150–$500, with stores typically landing in the upper half or above it depending on extensions, integrations, and subscription complexity. The proposal states the exact fixed fee.
A plugin review covers one layer. This audit also examines checkout scripts, roles and sessions, data exposure, business logic, and recovery — the layers where store-specific losses actually occur.