The Florist Photo That Never Leaves Your Website
Florists carry the tags that put a photo on a shared link on 68.9% of sites, row 44 of 47. The wedding gets decided in a group chat, and your flowers never arrive.
“Nobody shares a florist’s website, Patrick. Customers see the flowers on Instagram, or they walk past the shop.”
That arrived as a text message last March, about an hour after I’d asked a shop owner to try something on her phone and report back.
I’ve chewed on it ever since, because she’s right about more of it than I wanted her to be.
So let me hand her the credit first. Then I’ll take back the part of it that’s quietly costing her weddings.
The half she has dead right
Flowers sell out of a window, and they always have.
A woman walks past on a Thursday afternoon, catches a bucket of ranunculus in the light, and comes back on Saturday morning with a particular birthday in mind. No website took any part in that conversation, and no amount of code was ever going to.
The people who love flowers really do live on Instagram, too. A beautiful arrangement collects a hundred hearts before a stranger has ever typed your business into a search box.
Florists understand that better than most of my clients. They point at their own profiles more often than almost any trade I audit, with 74.3% of these sites linking out to a social account against 66% across everything I check.
The photography on the website itself gets looked after as well. Rank every trade by how many pictures carry a written description and florists finish 2 of 47, at 63.7% coverage.
Only hospitality describes its photographs better, and two restaurants six doors apart show what that habit is worth.
Nobody in this business needs telling that the picture is the product.
So where do you think a bride’s mother meets your work for the very first time?
The half nobody in the shop ever sees
Wedding work doesn’t get bought out of a window.
It gets decided inside a group chat, late in the evening, between three or four people who are nowhere near each other. The bride, her mother, her sister, and the friend who got married in September and has opinions about everything.
One of them finds you, copies your address, and drops it into the conversation.
What appears in front of the other three is either a photograph with your name printed underneath it, or a blue string of characters with your business buried somewhere in the middle of it.
The order goes to whichever shop’s flowers showed up in the message. Open Graph tags are the reason a photograph shows up at all, and without them your page has nothing to offer a phone except the address itself.
Florists carry those tags on 68.9% of the websites I opened, row 44 of 47, and nothing else I check treats this trade so badly. Manufacturers lose buyers in the same silence, naming every page carefully and sending the link out with nothing on it. Across everything else I audit the figure comes out at 75.7%.
Careful with the photographs on the page. Careless with the only photograph that ever leaves it.
What would you spend to put an arrangement of yours in front of a stranger who has never heard your name? You paid that bill already, in the years it took to earn the recommendation in the first place.
“She’ll click through anyway”
That’s the answer I usually get next, and it’s a fair one.
The woman who pasted the link already knows exactly who you are. She’s been in, she’s seen the cooler, she’s smelled the eucalyptus, and she’s already decided.
She isn’t the one you lost.
The other three are voting at eleven at night, in bed, with four shops sitting in the same conversation and a sister-in-law who wants the whole business settled before Sunday lunch.
Which of those four links would your thumb go to?
The wedding I watched go
A shop I worked with last spring had a bride who’d already made her mind up completely.
She sent the address to her mother.
Her mother sent back a competitor, because that particular link arrived carrying a photograph of a table setting, and asked whether anyone had considered this one instead.
The bride told me about it months afterwards, laughing, the way people laugh about something that happened to someone else entirely.
The shop never knew. A thing like that never turns up as a lost inquiry, because there was never an inquiry to lose in the first place.
How many of those have gone past you while you were standing at the bench?
Why this column and not the others
Something separates it from every other check I run.
Every review under your name got typed by a woman who was still glowing about a Saturday. A picture gets described because the person uploading it is looking directly at the thing while she types.
Tags don’t arrive as a reward for doing beautiful work. Someone has to sit down deliberately and put them in, or the website goes up without them and stays that way for another six years. Whoever owns the site owns that job, along with the rest of the quiet repairs a website needs once it’s live.
Some website software will write them for you, if a particular switch got turned on during the afternoon your site was built. The switch is nearly always still off, because that afternoon went on fonts, colors and getting the phone number right.
Someone will ring you to say the software itself is the problem and offer to replace the lot. Replacing the lot is the one job I turn flower shops down on.
So which pair of hands did you expect to type them in? Not your customer, and not the person who looks after your Instagram, and certainly not you, because you have never once been shown the thing that’s missing.
The objection I have the most sympathy for
“Not one single person has ever mentioned it to me.”
Of course they haven’t.
She isn’t going to text you afterwards to report that your link showed up bare when she forwarded it to her sister. She barely noticed it herself, and whatever she did notice arrived as a feeling rather than a thought.
The feeling never reaches you, and it doesn’t need to, because by then it has already turned into an order at another shop.
And how exactly would you find out? Nobody writes to a florist about a link preview.
Silence isn’t evidence that nothing happened. Silence is the most expensive thing on your entire website, and it costs you flowers you never knew were being discussed.
One promise, and I’m keeping it small
Fix this and your phone won’t ring differently on Monday.
Nothing moves in Google. No chart climbs. Nobody sends you a note about it either, because no customer alive has ever noticed one of these being done properly.
What you get instead is narrower, and I happen to think it’s worth considerably more than the noisy version.
The next time your name gets handed from one person to another, your flowers travel along with it. Whoever opens that message meets your work before she meets your address, which is the order those two things were always supposed to arrive in.
You won’t be able to point at the wedding it won you, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you something. My scoring runs on ten checks, florists come out of it on 73 out of 100, 20 of 47 among the industries I rank, and mending one of the ten leaves that number exactly where it is.
I build websites for flower shops, and on most of them the repair takes less of an afternoon than a single wedding consultation does.
So try it before you sleep tonight. Open the conversation you keep with your partner or your oldest friend, drop the address of your wedding page into it, and watch what fills in underneath.
Flowers and your name, and you can go to bed happy.
A bare blue line, and you’ve just found the cheapest repair on your entire website. Send it over and I’ll go through everything for nothing if you’d rather not go hunting through your own code for the reason.
Either way, one afternoon from now, your best photograph starts traveling with your name. Small promise. I’d rather keep it small and have it be true.
