What We Learnt Scanning Over 1,600 Florist Websites

• One florist website we looked at tells customers to order by 10am for same-day delivery. Another page on the same site says 10pm.
• Around 20 sites misspell their own shop name or town.
• About 100 spell lilies wrong.

We found these by going through over 1,600 websites from lists of florists, the way a customer would: reading the delivery page, opening a bouquet, picking a date and getting as far as the checkout, on a computer and on a phone.

Most of what we found is small and fixable in an afternoon. Some of it comes with the website itself, and needs a word with whoever looks after yours.

The software we built for this is now the Florist Website Checker in Florist Toolbox, so you can run the same checks on your own site. A quick check of your homepage is part of the free Lite plan, and the full report is part of Plus.

Pages That Disagree With Each Other

About a third of the sites we checked contradict themselves somewhere. It usually happens because a website gets added to over years, one page at a time, and the older pages never get updated.

Same-day cut-off times are the most common clash. About 1 in 5 sites that give a cut-off state different times on different pages, like order by 1pm on the delivery page and 2pm on the product page. That matters on the busiest days. A customer who reads 2pm and orders at 1:30 expects flowers today, and you either rush an order you didn't plan for or ring them to say no.

About 7 in 10 sites state a same-day cut-off at all. 1pm is the most common, then noon and 2pm. Nearly half of those only show it on the delivery page or another information page. The customer deciding whether they can still get flowers out today is looking at the homepage or the bouquet, so that's where the cut-off needs to be.

The rest of the clashes:

• Opening hours disagree on about 1 site in 11.
• More than 50 sites list two different phone numbers, and a few of those are missing a digit.
• At least 35 sites show one delivery charge on the delivery page and a different one in the basket, usually higher, often by £1. Even when the basket figure is the right one, a customer who sees the price go up at the last step tends to feel caught out.
• About 1 in 20 still had out-of-season banners or notices up when we looked in late October: spring and summer offers, a Sunday opening notice from March, a show banner from 2023. Nearly 20 still have COVID-era wording, from lockdown opening hours to old blog posts.

Leftover template text is rare, around 2% of sites. We found a delivery page where the list of towns was still a blank placeholder, a row of Xs where a phone number should be, and dummy Latin text at the top of a contact page. On a few funeral pages, a "Need it tomorrow?" countdown sits directly above the florist's own note asking for five working days' notice.

Buying on a Phone

On about half the product pages we checked, a phone shopper sees the header and the bouquet photo, but neither the price nor the add to basket button until they scroll. A big photo is what sells the bouquet, so this isn't all bad. The problem is the customer comparing three florists for a same-day order. They want to see the price straight away, and the shop that makes them hunt for it is the one they're most likely to skip.

About 8% of sites have no tap-to-call link on the mobile homepage. On some of those the number is printed as plain text you can't tap, and on others there's no number on the homepage at all. A lot of people ordering funeral flowers would rather talk to someone, and they're often doing it from their phone. Eleven sites have a call link that can't dial: an empty link, "0000", or a what3words address where the number should be.

One thing almost everyone gets right: of the 140 checkouts we got far enough into, only 3 made the customer create an account before ordering.

Slow Pages

The typical florist homepage is about 3.5 MB when opened on a phone. One in ten is over 10 MB. The heaviest was 51 MB, which at a modest 10 Mbps mobile connection is about 40 seconds of downloading. On one bar of signal it's over three minutes. Most people give up long before that, and Google takes page speed into account when it ranks sites.

About three quarters of that weight is pictures. Nearly a third of homepages use photos far bigger than the space they're shown in, such as a banner 3,600 pixels wide displayed at 360. One banner we found weighed 11.9 MB on its own. Instagram feeds embedded on the homepage add around 1.3 MB.

The fix is usually simple. Resize photos before you upload them; a homepage banner rarely needs to be more than 2,000 pixels wide. Some website platforms also shrink pictures into newer, lighter formats automatically and some don't, so it's worth asking yours.

Google's own phone speed test scores fewer than 2% of florist sites as "good", and the typical score is 62 out of 100. On decent wifi most customers won't notice. On a weak signal outside a funeral home, they will.

Typos

Nearly 3 in 4 florist sites have at least one typo or slip, counting missing apostrophes and doubled words. About 6 in 10 have a genuinely misspelt word. At least half of the sites with a mistake have one or two.

Flower names are a common casualty. Lilies were spelt wrong on about 100 sites, usually as "lillies" or "lilly". Then alstroemeria (often missing its first "e"), gypsophila, and chrysanthemum, which we saw spelt seven different ways. The most common mix-up that isn't a flower is compliment and complement, on about 70 sites, as in "complimentary foliage".

The ones that matter most are on funeral pages. About 1 in 12 sites have a typo on one, including misspellings of "spray", "interment" and "losing". A few are on payment information, like a card that turns into a debt card. At least 20 sites misspell their own shop name or town.

Not every typo was written by the florist. We found the same sentence, with the same two typos in it, on 15 different shops. It came with their website.

Reading the page silently doesn't catch these, because you read what you meant to write. Reading it out loud does.

Hard to Read

Accessibility is where florist sites struggled most, by some distance. It covers whether people with poor eyesight, or who use their phone's read-aloud setting, can get through the site.

6 in 10 sites have text so pale against its background that it fails the most basic readability test. It's often the parts that matter: prices, product names, "order by 4pm", "Shop now". Pale grey on white looks smart on a large screen and is hard to read on a phone in daylight.

9 in 10 sites have buttons or links that a phone reading the page aloud can only announce as "link", with nothing to say where it goes. On nearly half the sites that includes the phone button. Over 4 in 10 have pictures with no description at all, often the tiles customers tap to find a category like sympathy.

Many people ordering sympathy flowers are older customers, and they're the ones most likely to be caught out by faint text and unlabelled buttons.

When Customers Share or Search

Of the sites we could check, about 7 in 10 don't tell WhatsApp or Facebook which picture and title to show when someone shares a link. So when a customer sends a bouquet to their sister to ask what she thinks, it often turns up without a photo. The photo is what sells it.

Almost half don't list their opening hours, address and phone number on the website in the hidden format Google reads. This is separate from your Google Business Profile. It helps Google show the right details when someone searches for a florist nearby, and your website provider can add it.

Only 1 in 5 sites show reviews on the homepage. A customer choosing between three florists is more likely to pick the one where they can see what other people thought.

Of the sites that list an email address, nearly 4 in 10 use a Gmail or Hotmail one. That's fine for a lot of customers, but to someone about to pay £60 to a shop they've never used, an address like [email protected] looks more established.

Things That Come With the Website

Some problems turned up in identical form across hundreds of shops, which tells you they come with the website software rather than anything the florist did. You can't fix these yourself, but you can ask your provider about them.

About a third of sites show a security warning when the address is opened without the "www" over a secure link (https://yourshop.co.uk rather than https://www.yourshop.co.uk). Typing your address into Chrome usually still works. A link on a Google profile, a Facebook bio or a QR code on a card often uses that version, though, and a customer who sees a "not secure" warning will usually close the page.

About 4 in 10 of the sites we tested show a server error, instead of a "page not found" message, when someone follows an old or mistyped link. A customer following a link to last year's Mother's Day bouquet from an old Facebook post lands on an error with no way back into the shop. To Google, it looks like a site having problems rather than a page that has gone.

About 8 in 10 sites still load a version of jQuery, a common piece of website code, from 2014 or 2015. It is no longer updated with security fixes. That isn't a reason to panic, but out-of-date code is the kind of thing a website provider should be keeping on top of.

Plenty is right as well. Almost every site uses a secure connection, none had an expired security certificate, and all but one of the checkouts we reached were secure.

How We Did It

The software we built opens a florist website in a real browser and goes through it like a customer: homepage, delivery page, a sympathy page, a product, then the date, the basket and the checkout. It does this twice, at computer size and at phone size. Where a form insists on details, it uses a made-up recipient name and a test card message. It never enters real personal details, never ticks a terms box and stops before any payment page. It also blocks analytics while it browses, so it doesn't show up in a shop's visitor numbers.

It runs 166 checks across seven areas, weighted towards the things that decide whether someone orders: delivery information, the basket and the checkout. Most are plain measurements, like how big a picture is or what the website sends back for a missing page. Spelling and contradictions need reading, so we use AI for those: one model proofreads the text and another looks at screenshots. Every typo and contradiction it reports has to quote the exact words, so the florist can see it for themselves, and where a measurement and the AI disagree, the measurement wins.

We ran 48 sites at a time, and the whole batch took about two and a half hours. A typical site took around three minutes. Nearly 4 in 10 sites sit behind a security check that turns away anything that isn't an ordinary browser, so for those we went back with a full browser. We didn't mark anyone down for a check their customers never see.

Sometimes the software gets things wrong. If you disagree with something in your report, tap Report a mistake on it. It helps us improve the Website Checker for all florists.

Things to Check on Your Own Site

1. Turn off wifi and open your homepage on your phone. Count how long it takes.
2. Open a bouquet on your phone and see whether the price shows without scrolling.
3. Find every place your same-day cut-off appears, including the basket. Check the times match, and that it's on the homepage.
4. Check your opening hours and phone number are the same on every page and on your Google profile.
5. Tap your phone number on your mobile homepage and check it dials.
6. Read your delivery and funeral pages out loud.
7. Type https:// followed by your address without the www (for example https://yourshop.co.uk) and see what comes up.
8. Send a bouquet link to yourself on WhatsApp and see whether a photo appears.
9. Look for anything seasonal that should have come down.

Or put your address into the Florist Website Checker and it will go through these for you and explain anything it finds.

If any of the problems in "Things That Come With the Website" show up on yours, send that section to your website provider and ask when they can fix it.