Three Cheap Jobs for a Flower Shop, and the Rebuild I’d Turn Down

Twenty past nine on a Tuesday night, a kitchen table two towns over, a woman holding her phone out at arm’s length because her eyes have had about enough of the day.

Her aunt died on Sunday. The service is Thursday morning and there are still no flowers ordered.

She isn’t going to telephone a stranger at this hour and say those sentences out loud. She’s going to look at three or four shops, decide, and then go to bed.

Your website has her for about ninety seconds, and it will never get a friendlier ninety seconds than these.

Do you know what she meets first on yours?

What she actually needs, in order

She needs to know you deliver to that particular funeral home. She needs to know you can manage it by Thursday morning. And she needs some way of telling you so without speaking to anybody.

Everything else on your website is decoration until those three are settled.

One evening I checked which trades have anyone watching this happen at all, and florists came out 41 of 47, on 48.6% of the sites I opened.

You’re not on WordPress, and someone keeps telling you that’s the problem

Most of the trades I audit are running WordPress. Flower shops are the exception, because most of them bought store software instead of website software, which turns out to be a sensible thing for a business that sells objects. The builder comparison is worth having once, before you buy, and I’ve laid two of them side by side for owners at that stage. You settled yours the day you chose something that could take an order.

Shopify runs 20.4% of the florist websites I opened and WordPress runs 14.5%, a long way underneath the 36.4% WordPress takes across small business sites in general.

I have listened to that gap being used against a florist on a sales call, more than once. Someone rings up to explain that serious businesses run WordPress, that you’re stuck on a toy, and that a rebuild would fix your position in Google.

Ignore them. I used the platform as a shortcut myself for years, ticking checks off in my head the moment a plumber’s site turned out to run WordPress, and it made me worse at the job rather than faster.

The same call goes out in reverse elsewhere. Assisted living owners tell me they’re on WordPress as though that ends the conversation, and it ends nothing.

How many of those calls have you taken since Christmas?

Your software is not what’s wrong with your website, and I’d rather you checked that yourself than believed me about it. The explorer near the foot of my report will roll an entire trade up for you if you choose Florists from the industry list and leave the city box alone, and the card it gives back prints every rate I’m quoting here with the number of sites standing behind it.

With almost no money, the order I’d work in runs like this.

First: a box she can use at twenty past nine

21.3% of florist homepages carry a contact form, where 28% of small business homepages have one.

I’d hand that job to whoever looks after your site and expect it back the same afternoon, because on most store software it’s a setting one person switches on rather than anything anybody has to build.

What it buys you is the woman at the kitchen table. She types “Thursday morning, St Mary’s, something white, my aunt loved peonies” into a box and puts her phone down on the table.

She cannot make that phone call tonight. She’d have to say the words to a stranger, and she is nowhere near ready to.

By morning she will have ordered somewhere else, and the part that should worry you is that you’ll never know she was there at all.

Would you have made that phone call yourself?

Second: find out who came by

Analytics is free, it takes about twenty minutes, and the person who set your website up can do it without touching a single thing your customer sees.

I’ve already told you where this trade lands on it. The number isn’t really what matters, though. What matters is that you are running a business off memory and general feeling.

Do you know whether anyone opened your sympathy page last month? Not a guess. An actual answer, with a date attached to it.

Once it’s on, you learn that the funeral pages get read late at night and the wedding pages get read at lunchtime, which changes what you’d put on each of them.

You also learn whether the box from the first job is being used, which is the only way that job ever proves itself to you.

Third: one wedding a month, written down

25.9% of these shops publish anything at all, against 37% of the websites I audit.

I know how that lands. You didn’t get into flowers so you could sit down in the evening and write paragraphs.

So don’t write them. Whoever runs your Instagram already has the photographs and already wrote the caption, and moving that onto your own website is copying rather than composing.

A shop owner texted me last March to say nobody shares a florist’s website. She had half of it right, and the other half was quietly costing her weddings.

If it were my shop, I’d do one wedding a month. What the couple asked for, what was actually in season that week, what you talked them out of, and six pictures taken in the shop before the van left.

A page like that does something your homepage adjectives can never do. It proves you did a real wedding, in this town, in March, for people with the same worries as the person reading it.

Could you find six photographs from last month without hunting for them? Then the page is already most of the way written.

Who does it? The Instagram person, in the half hour after they’ve posted. It’s an hour a month and it costs you nothing but the hour.

The job I’d turn down

A rebuild.

Florists average 59 out of 100 for how fast their pages come up on a phone, against 58 across every site I run the test on.

Dead average, in other words, and I am entirely relaxed about dead average. Nobody has ever lost a funeral order over a tenth of a second, and nobody is going to win one back for you by chasing it either.

The pitch you’ll hear is that moving onto a proper platform fixes your search results and your speed in one go. It’ll cost you a season, it’ll break your product pages in ways nobody warns you about, and the woman at the kitchen table will not notice a single thing.

In my experience she isn’t comparing your website against a competitor’s website at all. She’s comparing it against going to sleep.

I build websites for flower shops and I’d still turn that job down this week, because the three above would do more for her and cost you a fraction of the attention.

Who this wasn’t written for

If you’ve got a studio, a wedding coordinator and a designer on call, none of this was aimed at you. You did all three of these years ago, someone sends you numbers on a Monday morning, and you already know which page she reads first.

It wasn’t written for the shop that wants a beautiful website either. Beautiful is a real conversation and it costs more than an afternoon, and I’d enjoy having it with you some other time.

It was written for the one-van shop with a cooler, a phone that rings without stopping all December, and a website a cousin built back in 2018 that nobody has opened since.

Three jobs, no rebuild, and none of them needing a designer. If you can’t tell which of the three is missing on yours, send me the address and I’ll go through the lot and tell you what I’d do first.