Why Check Your Website Before Peak
Plenty of peak orders come through your website, and plenty of those customers are on a phone. If the order-by date is missing, the delivery charge shows up at the last step, or last year's Christmas banner is still on the homepage, a customer can give up and order elsewhere. You probably won't hear about it.
By the second week of February the workroom is full and nobody has an hour for the website provider. So do the check three or four weeks out, while there is still time to get changes made.
This checklist takes about 30 minutes. Do it on your own phone, as if you were a customer seeing your shop for the first time, and note down everything that slows you down.
Before You Start (2 Minutes)
- Use your phone, not the shop computer. Check the layout your customers see on a small screen.
- Turn off the shop wifi. Use mobile data so the site loads the way it does for a customer on the bus.
- Open a private browsing tab. Use a fresh private window so you begin without the shop account or basket from your usual browser session.
- Pick one product you expect to sell well, such as your dozen red roses for Valentine's Day or a mid-priced hand-tie for Mother's Day. You will follow it all the way to the payment page.
The Homepage (5 Minutes)
Type your web address in rather than tapping a bookmark.
- Count the seconds until you can see a product. If you are still waiting for the main picture after a few seconds, write it down. A large photo or slideshow at the top is a common cause.
- Look for the occasion. In the four weeks before Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, the day should be on the homepage, near the top, with a link to the range.
- Look for dates that have gone. A "Closed 26 to 28 December" notice from last year, Easter opening hours in October, or a Valentine's banner still running in March all make the shop look unattended.
- Find your phone number and tap it. It should open the phone's dialler with your number filled in. If you have to copy it by hand, that is a fix for your website provider.
- Check your opening hours match. Compare the hours in the banner, the footer and the contact page. If the footer says 9am to 5pm and the banner says 9am to 6pm, a customer can't tell which is right.
Delivery Information (5 Minutes)
Peak customers want to know where you deliver, by when, and what it costs. Each answer should be easy to find from the homepage.
- Order-by time for same-day delivery. "Same-day delivery" without a time leaves customers guessing. Put the time on the pages people shop from, such as "Order by 1pm for same-day delivery", rather than only on the delivery page.
- Order-by date for the day itself. For example, "Order by 12 February for Valentine's Day delivery". Check the date of Mother's Day in your country before updating the page.
- Where you deliver. A list of towns, a radius or a postcode checker. If the list is a picture of text, customers can't search it or zoom it cleanly, and Google may not read it as part of your page.
- What delivery costs on the day. If you charge more for Valentine's Day or for timed deliveries, say so before checkout. Not sure your peak-day charge covers the extra runs? Check it with the Delivery Profitability Calculator (part of Plus) before you publish it.
- Funerals and hospitals. If you deliver to funeral directors, say so. If local hospitals don't accept flowers on wards, say that too, so a customer doesn't order something you can't deliver.
If the answers are spread across a delivery page, an FAQ and a terms page, check that they agree. It is easy to update a cut-off time on one page and miss the other.
The Product Page (5 Minutes)
Open the product you picked earlier.
- Is there a description of what is in it? Stems, colours and roughly how big. "Seasonal flowers" alone leaves a Valentine's buyer with questions.
- Can you choose a delivery date? If the date box doesn't appear on the product page, check it appears in the basket or at checkout.
- Does the date box stop offering today after your cut-off? For example, if your cut-off is 1pm, check the site at 2pm. If it still offers today's date, a customer can book a delivery you can't make. This is usually a setting in your delivery date tool, or one your website provider can change.
- Is there a card message box? If your printed cards hold a set number of characters, check the box on the site has the same limit. Our guide to what to write on flower cards has examples you can link from the product page. For orders that come in by phone, the Card Message Generator (part of Plus) drafts three messages to read back to the sender.
The Checkout Walk (8 Minutes)
It is the part that is easiest to skip, and it is where a confused customer is most likely to give up. Add your product to the basket and walk through to the payment page. Stop there. Don't enter card details.
- Count the steps. Write down each page that loads between the product and the first page that asks for your name or address. A basket and a delivery page is two. If it is five or six, ask your website provider whether any can be combined.
- Check you can order without an account. A guest option should be easy to spot. If "Create an account" comes first and "Continue as guest" is lower down, some customers will read the first one and leave.
- Look for the total before you type anything. The delivery charge and any peak surcharge should be on screen before the customer starts filling in boxes.
- Check the form says whose details are whose. Many flower orders are gifts. If there are two sets of "Name" and "Address" boxes that look the same, label one for the recipient and one for the sender, or the flowers can go to the person paying.
If you want to be sure the whole order goes through, use your payment provider's test mode if it has one. Otherwise place a real small order and cancel or refund it through your payment provider, checking first how your provider handles refunds and fees. Mark it clearly as a test (for example in the card message) and tell the workroom team, so nobody makes it up.
Trust, Links And Pictures (5 Minutes)
- Tap every link in the menu and the footer. A broken one in the main menu matters most, because that is how customers find what to order.
- Check the address bar doesn't say "Not secure" and that your address starts with https. If you see a warning, contact your website provider that day.
- Find your terms and privacy pages. Customers ordering flowers they won't see before delivery may want to know what happens if a stem is substituted or the order arrives damaged. What those pages should say is for you and your adviser to decide, so check they exist and are linked from the footer.
- Look at your photos on the phone. Check they are sharp and show flowers you sell this season. Our flower photography tips help if any need replacing.
What To Fix First
You will probably end up with a list of ten or more things. Fix the ones that stop orders before the ones that look untidy.
As an illustrative example, a shop might write this list:
- Same-day order-by time only on the delivery page
- Valentine's surcharge only appears on the payment page
- Old Christmas closure notice still on the homepage
- Phone number in the header isn't tappable
- Footer link to "Wedding Enquiries" goes to a missing page
- Logo looks blurry on the phone
Items 1 to 3 affect peak orders directly, so send them to your website provider first. Items 4 and 5 are quick to do at the same time. The logo can wait.
While you are thinking about peak, check your prices too. Use your supplier's current rose prices to work your Valentine's prices out from your own costs with the Dozen Red Rose Calculator, and see our guide to Valentine's Day red rose pricing and seasonal pricing for florists. If your website prices change for peak, update the printed price list on the counter as well with the Pricing Guide generator.
How The Florist Website Checker Speeds This Up
Doing this by hand before every peak takes time you may not have in January. Our free Florist Website Checker covers much of this list for you.
The quick check needs no account. Type in your web address and, when the check finishes, you see an overall score, a score and an issue count for each area it could check, and your homepage as it looks on a computer and a phone.
The full report opens once you sign in and confirm the site is yours, for example by signing up with an email address on your website's own domain (such as [email protected]), or by opening a link we email to an address shown on your site. It scores seven areas: Florist Essentials, Ordering & Checkout, Speed & Mobile, Search & Local, Trust & Security, Design & Content, and Accessibility. It reads your homepage plus your contact, delivery, category, product, privacy, about and FAQ pages where it can find them. Problems are marked on screenshots of your own site where they can be shown, with how to fix each one.
Much of the checklist above maps onto what it measures:
- Order-by times and dates. It looks for a same-day order-by time and where it sits. In the run-up to Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, it checks whether the day is on your homepage with an order-by date, a delivery charge or a booking-up notice.
- Dates that have gone. It flags closure notices and opening hours whose dates have passed, and homepage banners or best sellers still promoting an occasion that is over.
- Same-day cut-off. If you run the check after your same-day cut-off, it also looks at whether the product page still offers today. The 2pm test in the product page section above is still the dependable way to check this.
- The checkout walk. It adds one product to the basket, at computer size and, when it can continue, at phone size, and counts the steps until the first form asking for details. It checks for a guest option and whether the delivery charge and total show before that form. It stops before any real personal or payment details, and it doesn't place an order.
- Links, speed and security. It tests the links in your menu, footer and the pages it read, runs Google's speed test on your homepage, and warns when your security certificate is close to expiring.
Most results come from measuring what is on the page. An AI also reads your pages and screenshots for a second opinion on things like your logo, photos and wording. Those findings are labelled as an AI review and count for less than measured results. Where an AI note repeats something the checker measured, the measured result takes its place.
Run it three or four weeks before each peak, send the report to your web designer, then run it again after the fixes to see the score change. The peak check covers Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Before Christmas, check your last order dates by hand using the list above.
After Peak
Put a reminder in the diary for the day after: take down the Valentine's banner, remove the surcharge note, and put your everyday range back at the top of the homepage.
Peak is also a good time to keep in touch with new customers. Digital Florists sends automated occasion reminders to customers who have ordered through it before, so last year's Mother's Day buyers get a reminder from you ahead of the day.
Common Questions
How far before Valentine's Day should I check my website?
Three to four weeks before gives your website provider time to make changes. Run a shorter second check in the final week.
What should I fix first on my website before peak?
Anything that stops or confuses an order: missing order-by times, delivery charges that only appear at payment, old closure notices and broken menu links. Design changes can usually wait.
Does the Florist Website Checker place orders on my site?
No. It does not place or pay for an order, and it does not contact your customers. For the full report it may add one product to a basket and fill in only what the basket needs, using clearly marked test details. It stops before any real personal or payment details. You may see an abandoned test basket afterwards.
Is the Florist Website Checker free?
The quick check is free and needs no account. The full report opens once you sign in and confirm the site is yours. See Plans And Billing for which plans include it.
