Turn Me Royal: rebuilt theme, shorter load time and A/B tests

What is Turn Me Royal?

Turn Me Royal makes custom artwork: they turn customer photos into royal-style portraits.

They wanted the theme rebuilt to improve load time, usability and conversion rate, and to get a lot of new features and new design in at the same time.

Section from the site showing how it works

The Problems with the Old Theme

Old design that was not built to get people to buy.
Hard to edit: even small changes needed a developer, and the code was messy and hard to maintain.
Slow load times, with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Contentful Paint (FCP) being major bottlenecks.

Turn Me Royal homepage before the redesign: the old Shopify theme prior to the performance rebuild

The New Theme & Performance Optimizations

I rewrote a lot of the code, built new sections and moved the theme to Theme OS 2.0 with a build process that bundles the code.

What made the difference

Load time went from 9 s to 2-3 s
Images in the right size for mobile and desktop, with lazy loading
Fewer third-party scripts and libraries, so the theme loads less code

Turn Me Royal PageSpeed before and after: load time down from 9 s to 2-3 s after the theme rebuild

Split Testing & CRO Insights

With Hotjar I found problems like ghost clicks (clicks on things that are not clickable) and areas nobody used. That decided what to change and test.

Hotjar scroll heatmap of the new Turn Me Royal homepage showing engagement above the fold

Split Testing with VWO

All major changes were A/B tested with a custom VWO integration. Shopify has no full integration with VWO, so I built my own A/B testing setup, including price tests with Shopify Functions.

VWO split test variant of the Turn Me Royal homepage: new hero composition

VWO split test results for the Turn Me Royal homepage redesign

New Features & Functional Improvements

Here are some of the key improvements I’ve made to Turn Me Royal.

The old menu was hard to use, especially on mobile. The new one has an image for each category, and I A/B tested it against the old one.

Additional Pet Feature (Shopify Functions)

Customers can now add an extra pet to their portrait, with an automatic additional charge applied via Shopify Functions.

CRO optimized purchase flow with the additional pet feature

New Cart with Upsells

I built a new cart where the customer can add a digital version of the portrait, and that is quicker to use. It was A/B tested against the old one, and average order value (AOV) went up.

Turn Me Royal slide-out cart with a digital-version upsell, built to raise AOV

Optimized Contact Form

The contact form now takes several images and shows a preview before sending. It uses custom form logic rather than the default Shopify one.

Turn Me Royal contact form with reference-photo upload for custom portrait commissions

Multiple Facebook Pixels

I built a custom pixel integration with one global Facebook pixel plus one per market, so each market’s ad campaigns get the right data.

Landing Pages & Special Events

In the old theme they could not make their own landing pages without custom code or an app. Now they build pages for campaigns like Valentine’s Day and Christmas themselves in the theme editor.

Final Thoughts

This has been a really good project to work on, covering many different parts of a Shopify store. Want something similar? Get in touch.