Turn Me Royal - Revamping a Legacy Theme & Split Testing

What is Turn Me Royal?

Turn Me Royal is a custom artwork company that transforms customer photos into royal-style portraits.

They wanted to modify their theme to improve site speed, usability, and conversion rate while implementing a lot of new features and designs.

Section from the site showing how it works

The Problems with the Old Theme

Outdated design that lacked a conversion-focused structure.
Difficult to edit, requiring developer involvement for even minor changes, with messy code that was hard to maintain.
Slow load times, with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Contentful Paint (FCP) being major bottlenecks.

Turn Me Royal pre-redesign homepage — legacy Shopify theme before performance rebuild

The New Theme & Performance Optimizations

To resolve these issues, I refactored a lot of code, built entirely new sections, and transferred the theme to Theme OS 2.0 with a full build process for optimized bundling and speed enhancements.

Key Performance Gains:

✅ Load time improved from 9s → 2-3s
✅ Optimized image loading with correct sizes for mobile/desktop and smart lazy-loading.
✅ Reduced third-party scripts & unnecessary libraries, streamlining the codebase.

Turn Me Royal PageSpeed before/after — load time reduced from 9s to 2–3s after theme rebuild

Split Testing & CRO Insights

Using tools like Hotjar, we found CRO performance issues such as “ghost clicks” and areas with low user activity, leading to improved UX.

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

Split Testing with VWO

All major changes were fully split-tested using a custom VWO integration. Shopify doesn’t have a full integration with VWO, so I built a custom-coded system for split testing - also including more advanced features like price split testing using 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 previous menu was difficult to use, especially on mobile. The new version is image-based, more intuitive, and fully split-tested to improve navigation.

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

Introduced a completely new cart with upsell options for digital versions & faster processing. Fully split-tested, leading to a higher average order value (AOV).

Turn Me Royal slide-out cart with digital-version upsell — built to lift AOV

Optimized Contact Form

Better contact form with multiple images and image previews. 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

Custom-built pixel integration for multi-market tracking (global + per-market pixels). Ensured smooth data collection across multiple ad campaigns.

Landing Pages & Special Events

On the previous Shopify theme, creating custom landing pages wasn’t possible without custom code or an app. The new theme enables fully customizable landing pages for promotions like Valentine’s Day & Christmas, making it easier to launch seasonal campaigns.

Final Thoughts

This has been a great project to work on, touching many different aspects of a Shopify store. If you want anything similar to this, feel free to reach out.