Portronics (portronics.com) has one of the best gadget catalogues in India and a Shopify store that scores 0 for accessibility, 30 out of 100 on mobile performance, and has no robots.txt file. Live collection pages show placeholder images. The blog URL returns page not found. Three H1 tags sit on the product page. 151 products, 30% of the catalogue, are out of stock with no way to ask for a restock alert. We ran the audit live on 27 August 2026 and this is what was on the page that day.
Both of us buy from Portronics. That is why it was on the list. Watch the Portronics segment from 29:32 in the full episode. We ran the three-page audit this time: homepage, a collection page and a product page.
The scores
| Area | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Performance (desktop) | Green | Fine |
| Performance (mobile) | 30 / 100 | About 10 seconds to load a page, 5 seconds to first content |
| Best practices | 96 | Mostly images and little content, so little to get wrong |
| Accessibility | 0 | No alt text, poor contrast, undescribed links, touch targets too small |
| Shopify SEO | 61 | Missing robots.txt, three H1s, incomplete schema |
| Catalogue quality | 82 | 30% out of stock, five empty collections, external image hosts |
The mobile number is the one to take seriously. People bounce within two to three seconds now. Five seconds of blank screen on a phone is a store that does not work on the device most shoppers use.
What a shopper sees first
Nikhil's first complaint, before the tool finished: he cannot find the all-products page from the site. He goes to Google, types Portronics products, and clicks the /collections/all result Google has indexed. That page is not linked from the navigation.
Then we opened the collections page. Several live collections show the theme's placeholder image and a 277 by 250 default size because no collection image has been uploaded. Some show a banner image stretched into the thumbnail slot instead of the square collection image. Scrolling further: collections called "Gulal", "GST 28%", "LSG / Portronics", "Toolkit test". "Toolkit test" is live, has no products, and is a broken page. It reads as if someone inside the company is using collections as tags and never finished the job. The category thinking is good. The execution stopped halfway.
Search is the next leak. Type "conference speaker" and nothing relevant appears, although Portronics has a conference speaker category in the menu. On the all-products page the filters are the basic theme filters, with no filtering by type, feature or category, even though every product page carries a long specification table. The data exists. It is not connected to discovery.
On the product page, the feature sections below the fold are images. Some look like clickable category tiles. They are not. A heatmap of that page would show a lot of dead clicks.
The out-of-stock problem
151 published products, 30% of the catalogue, are out of stock. One of them (the EcoGlow mini torch) has been out of stock for as long as Nikhil has been trying to buy it. The page says coming soon. There is no notify-me field, no pre-order option, and no way to leave an email or WhatsApp number.
This is the simplest revenue fix on the list. Early adopters will pay upfront and wait. Everyone else will leave an email. Either way you learn how much demand a restock has before you order it. Right now that demand goes to Amazon.
Shopify configuration flags
robots.txt is missing. Without crawl rules Google indexes everything: account pages, search result pages, the cart. We have seen stores where the cart page is the first result for the brand name. Shopify provides a default robots.txt; this store has none.
Shipping policy page is empty. The standard /policies/shipping-policy URL exists and contains nothing. Shipping information sits in an accordion on a custom page instead. The contact information page is blank too. Google Merchant Center and AI search look at the standard pages.
Purchased theme, modified and re-uploaded. Theme editor markers are still in the HTML ("theme developed by ..."), along with translation-missing errors from Liquid keys that have no value. The theme will not receive vendor updates.
CSP does not restrict script sources. Any injected script runs.
Product images hosted outside Shopify. Some product images are loaded from external URLs. If that host removes the file, the store shows a broken image.
Five collections contain no products. Live and crawlable.
Five render-blocking scripts. Tracking apps (analytics, session recording) have placed their scripts before the page content. The scripts load first, then the page. This is most of the mobile LCP problem. Nine of nine images have no size set and the hero image is not preloaded.
Seven font families. Which explains a good part of the accessibility score.
The blog URL is a 404. The footer links to /blogs. Posts exist under a different handle with no categories assigned, so the standard blog index shows page not found. A redirect fixes it in five minutes.
SEO and AI search
Three H1 tags on the page. Google is being told the page is about three things. It ranks for none of them. The same confusion applies to ChatGPT and Gemini when they decide which product page to cite.
Product structured data is incomplete. Product schema is missing a field, there is no breadcrumb list schema, and product pages have reviews on the page but no aggregate rating in the schema. So Google shows no stars, and AI search engines see a product with no rating. The tool also flagged product titles that are too opaque for AI queries. Our Shopify SEO guide walks through the schema fields.
No breadcrumbs in the navigation or the structured data.
Security
DMARC policy is set to none. This is the one item on the list that is not about the store. It means email that fails authentication for the portronics.com domain is delivered anyway. Anyone can send mail that looks like it comes from a Portronics address, to staff or to customers. Set the policy to quarantine, then reject.
The CSP, HSTS, referrer policy and permissions policy items are the same as on every store we have looked at. A store is a revenue asset. If it can be taken down for three days the loss is not only the sales, it is whether customers still trust it with a card.
Accessibility
The score is zero because there is nothing to score. No alt text. Foreground and background colours that do not meet contrast ratios. Links with no descriptive name, so a screen reader or an AI crawler cannot tell what a link does. Lists built from paragraph tags with CSS instead of list items. Touch targets too close together on mobile, which is the "random clicks" feeling both of us have had using the site on a phone.
Fix order
- Add a notify-me field to every out-of-stock product. Consider pre-orders for products you know are returning.
- Add robots.txt. Redirect /blogs. Fill the shipping policy and contact pages at the standard URLs.
- Fix the collection pages: upload collection images, unpublish test and empty collections, link /collections/all from the nav.
- Move tracking scripts to load after content, set image sizes, preload the hero. This alone should move the mobile score a long way.
- One H1 per page. Complete the product schema with aggregate rating and breadcrumbs.
- Connect the specification data to search and filters.
- Set DMARC to quarantine. Set CSP, HSTS, referrer and permissions headers.
- Cut to two font families. Add alt text and fix contrast.
Where Maxwize fits
We build and fix Shopify stores, and the audit tool in the episode is how we scope the work before quoting. If you want the same three-page audit on your store, or the fix list above done, see our Shopify services or write to nikhil@maxwize.in. Fixed price, fixed scope, no lock-in.