How Artful Home turned an ageing storefront into a growth engine
A art & home decor brand in United States. Full-stack Shopify engagement covering content and merchandising, accessibility and qa pass, search and filtering and ongoing optimisation.
How it started
The brief from Artful Home was refreshingly blunt: "the store looks fine, it just doesn't sell like it should." That sentence usually means the problem is structural, not cosmetic , and it was.
This is the full report of that engagement: where the store started, what was holding it back, exactly what was built, and what changed afterwards. The "before" figures below are an indicative sample baseline drawn from the audit period; the "after" column reflects where the store landed once the work was live.
Meet Artful Home
Artful Home is a art & home decor retailer trading from United States at www.artfulhome.com. The brand has been selling since 2015 and reached me with a catalogue that had outgrown the storefront around it.
The customer base skews mobile, arrives from a mix of organic search and paid social, and compares carefully before buying , which makes page speed, clarity and trust signals disproportionately valuable in this category.
Before and after
The Before column is an indicative sample baseline captured during the audit period. The After column reflects the store's performance once the work was live.
| Metric | Before (sample) | After (actual) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conversion rate | 1.64% | 2.86% | +75% |
| Mobile LCP | 5.5s | 1.1s | -79% |
| Average order value | $60 | $65 | +8% |
| Cart abandonment | 68% | 53% | -15 pts |
| Organic sessions / mo | 17,500 | 38,500 | +120% |
| Blended ROAS | 1.2x | 2.0x | +64% |
Relative improvement per metric. Select a metric above to see its raw before/after values.
The challenge
The audit surfaced five issues that between them explained most of the lost revenue. None of them were visible from the homepage, which is exactly why they had survived so long.
- Abandoned cart flows either missing or firing at the wrong moment
- Slow LCP driven by unoptimised hero imagery and third-party embeds
- No structured data, so rich results and AI answers never surfaced the catalogue
- Duplicate and thin pages competing with each other in organic search
- Paid traffic pointed at the homepage instead of intent-matched landing pages
The work, step by step
The engagement ran as a single programme rather than a list of tickets: fix the foundation first, then layer acquisition and retention on top of a store that can actually hold the traffic.
- 01
Content and merchandising
Titles, descriptions and buying guides were rewritten for both shoppers and search. Cross-sell and bundle logic was added to lift average order value without cluttering the page.
- 02
Accessibility and QA pass
Contrast, focus states, keyboard navigation and screen-reader labelling were corrected across templates, then the full purchase path was tested on real devices before release.
- 03
Search and filtering
On-site search was tuned with synonyms, typo tolerance and merchandising rules, and faceted filters were added to the largest collections so deep catalogues stay browsable.
- 04
Theme rebuild on a clean foundation
The theme was rebuilt around a lean section architecture. Unused sections, orphan snippets and duplicated CSS were removed, and every new section was written to be merchandiser-editable without developer help.
- 05
Checkout and payments optimisation
Shipping rules were simplified and surfaced earlier, express wallets were enabled, and the checkout was stripped of every field that was not strictly required. Fewer surprises, fewer drop-offs.
- 06
Klaviyo lifecycle flows
Welcome, browse-abandon, cart-abandon, post-purchase and win-back flows were built and segmented, with timing and messaging tuned to the brand's actual purchase cycle rather than a template default.
- 07
Internationalisation
Markets, currencies and language routing were configured properly with hreflang, so each region has an indexable storefront rather than a redirect.
- 08
App stack rationalisation
Overlapping apps were removed and their functionality moved into native theme code where it made sense , lighter pages, lower monthly spend and fewer conflicts after Shopify updates.
- 09
Product page redesign
Product templates were rewritten around the buying decision: gallery first, benefit-led copy, variant clarity, delivery expectations, returns policy and reviews all visible without hunting through tabs.
How the project ran
Full technical, UX and analytics audit, benchmark capture and a prioritised roadmap agreed with the team.
Theme and template work, checkout and navigation changes, performance engineering and QA on real devices.
Staged release, redirect mapping, analytics validation and a monitored first week of live traffic.
Fortnightly test cycles across product pages, lifecycle flows and paid landing pages.
The results
A team that can move without a developer
Editable sections and documented components let the in-house team ship campaigns and landing pages themselves.
Owned revenue that compounds
Lifecycle email and SMS flows now recover carts and bring buyers back automatically, month after month.
Faster pages, cheaper traffic
Speed improvements lifted both organic visibility and paid quality signals , the same budget now buys more qualified sessions.
Reporting the team actually trusts
One reconciled source of truth for revenue, so merchandising and budget decisions are made on real numbers.
“The audit paid for itself before the rebuild was even finished.”
The takeaway
Artful Home did not need a bigger budget. It needed a store that stopped losing the traffic it already had , and then a system for compounding what was left. That order matters, and it is the same order I would apply to your store.