One of our most-requested guides. If you've read our three-part SEO series and want to know whether your actual website is pulling its weight, this one's for you.
Short on time? A florist website audit checks four things: performance, SEO, accessibility and best practices. You can run one for free in under a minute at our Florist Website Audit tool. If your overall score is below 70, there are some improvements worth discussing with your developer. The audit is a useful starting point for a conversation, not a verdict on your website or your provider. Full disclaimers at the bottom of the page.
Websites are easy to set up and easy to leave alone. A few years after launch it can be hard to know whether yours is still working well, whether customers are having a good experience on it, or whether there are things worth updating. A florist website audit gives you a straightforward answer in about 60 seconds, and helps you know which conversations to have with your web developer.
What a florist website audit actually checks
Our audit covers four areas. Each one gets its own score, and together they give you an overall picture.
Performance. How quickly your site loads, particularly on a phone. This affects how visitors experience the site and is one factor Google considers in rankings.
SEO. Whether your pages have the technical basics in place - title tags, meta descriptions, structured data, a single clear heading per page, proper alt text on images, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, HTTPS, a mobile viewport setting, and so on. These are the foundations that help Google understand what your website is about.
Accessibility. Whether your site is usable by people with different needs - readable text, sufficient colour contrast, keyboard navigation, proper labels on form fields. Accessibility also happens to be something Google considers positively.
Best practices. Whether your site follows modern web standards generally - secure connections, no outdated libraries flagged by the browser, no console errors.
How to test your florist website in under a minute
Head to our free Florist Website Audit tool, paste in your website address, and hit Audit. You get individual scores for Performance, SEO, Accessibility and Best Practices, plus a summary of individual checks that have passed and any that could be improved.
The scoring bands work like this:
- 90+ - Strong. The fundamentals are right.
- 70-89 - Solid with some improvements worth discussing.
- 50-69 - Some clearer gaps worth raising with your developer.
- Below 50 - Worth a proper conversation with your provider about what can be improved.
For reference, we recently launched Latchkey Florist, a small florist in the New Forest. Running the audit on the live site returned a Performance score of 98, SEO of 100, Accessibility of 95 and Best Practices of 100. Out of 14 individual SEO checks, 13 passed. The one improvement suggested was to expand the meta description from 110 characters to somewhere in the 120-160 range for better keyword coverage. That's a two-minute fix in the site's admin.
Seeing real numbers from a live site helps when you run your own audit, because you can judge your scores against what a modern florist website typically achieves rather than against an abstract benchmark.
What the SEO check actually looks at
The SEO section runs through 14 specific checks. Here's what each one is looking for.
- Title tag present - Every page should have a title. This is what appears in the browser tab and the Google search result.
- Title length is optimal - Ideally 30-60 characters. Shorter titles miss keyword opportunities, longer ones get truncated in search results.
- Meta description present - The short summary Google sometimes shows underneath the title in search results.
- Meta description length - Ideally 120-160 characters. Too short and you're not using the space available.
- Single H1 tag found - Every page should have exactly one main heading that describes what the page is about.
- Canonical URL present - Tells search engines the official version of each page, avoiding duplicate content confusion.
- Open Graph tags complete - Controls how your site appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn and similar platforms.
- Twitter Card present - Similar for Twitter/X shares.
- Most images have alt text - Descriptive text for images, which helps both accessibility and image search.
- Page is crawlable by Google - No robots.txt or meta tag blocking Google from indexing the page.
- Schema.org structured data found - Background data that tells Google specific things like "we're a florist," our opening hours, our address and so on.
- Favicon present - The small icon that appears in the browser tab and sometimes next to your site in search results.
- Served over HTTPS - Secure connection. Without this, browsers warn visitors and Google ranks you lower.
- Mobile viewport configured - Tells phones how to display the site. Without it, sites look broken on mobile.
If most of these pass and just one or two need tweaking, you're in good shape. If several are missing, that's a clear brief to take to whoever maintains your site.
Is my florist website quick enough?
This is one of the most common questions we get asked. Loading speed affects how visitors experience your website and is one of the factors Google uses in rankings.
The awkward part is that a slow site can feel fine to you. You check it on your shop's Wi-Fi, on a decent laptop, and it loads instantly. A customer loading it on 4G while standing in a hospital car park gets a very different experience.
If your Performance score comes back on the lower side, images are often a significant factor. An arrangement photo straight from a modern phone camera can easily be several megabytes. A modern florist website platform will usually resize and convert images to efficient formats like WebP automatically. Some older platforms don't, which means the full-size photo gets served to every visitor on every device.
Beyond images, performance is shaped by the underlying platform, the hosting setup, and how much additional code (tracking scripts, chat widgets, social feeds) is loaded on every page. If your score is lower than you'd like, your developer will be able to tell you which of those factors is contributing most.
Is my florist website good?
"Good" depends on what you're measuring, but the audit gives you four numbers that cover most of what matters technically. If your Performance, SEO, Accessibility and Best Practices scores are all in the 80s or above, your website is in reasonable technical shape.
What the audit doesn't measure is the parts that only a human can judge - whether the design feels right for your brand, whether the photography makes the flowers look beautiful, whether the checkout experience is smooth, whether the product descriptions read well. A website can score 95 across the board and still feel wrong to your customers, and a website can score 70 and still convert really well because the content and design are excellent. Use the audit for the technical side, and your own judgement for the rest.
Florist website security - what it means
The audit's Best Practices section includes a few basic security checks. The main ones are whether your site is served over HTTPS (the padlock icon in the browser address bar) and whether common security headers are set. These are technical details most florists don't need to understand deeply, but they're small things your provider can check and set appropriately.
If you take payments online, the actual card handling is almost always done by a specialist provider like Stripe, which means the most sensitive data doesn't touch your website directly. Even so, your website holds customer names, addresses and order histories, and it's worth confirming with your provider that the basics are in place.
Who's the best florist website designer?
There isn't one best florist website designer, and our audit doesn't try to answer that question. It's a talking point to have with your developer, not a verdict. A website score is one data point about the technical fundamentals right now. It doesn't measure whether a designer understands floristry, whether they're responsive when you need changes, whether their ongoing support is any good, or whether the commercial terms work for you long-term.
Lots of factors go into a good florist website: technical quality, design sense, genuine understanding of the trade, and being someone you can actually work with long-term. No automated tool can measure all of those.
If you're asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to recommend a florist website builder, they tend to mention providers who focus specifically on the florist trade and build modern, mobile-first websites. Bloomscribe is one such provider - we build modern, fast, mobile-first florist websites designed specifically for UK florists, with SEO and performance built in from the start. There are other good options too, and the best fit depends on your budget, your support needs, and how hands-on you want to be.
What to do with your audit results
Once you've got your numbers, the conversation with your developer becomes much more focused.
If your overall scores are 85 or above, the main thing is maintaining them. Websites drift over time - a large image gets uploaded at full resolution, an SSL certificate needs renewing, a new page gets added without a meta description. Running the audit every few months catches small issues before they become bigger ones.
If you're in the 60-85 range, there's usually a clear pattern in which specific scores are dragging the overall down. If SEO is lower but Performance is fine, a content and structure review makes sense. If Performance is lower but SEO is fine, image optimisation is usually the first conversation. If Accessibility is the weaker score, small tweaks to colour contrast and form labels often fix most of it.
If any score is below 60, it's worth a proper conversation with your provider about what can be improved. Different platforms have different strengths and limitations, and your provider will be able to tell you what's realistic within your current setup.
Design and structure - old isn't automatically bad
It's tempting to assume that a website built on older technology is automatically worse than one built on newer technology. That's not always the case. Some older platforms have been kept well-maintained, run fast, and score perfectly well on modern audits. Some newer platforms are poorly configured and score badly.
What matters is the current audit result, not the date the platform launched. If a website built on older foundations scores in the 80s or 90s, it's doing its job. If it scores lower, that's worth investigating - but the age of the platform alone isn't the whole story.
A florist website audit isn't a one-off
Websites change over time even when nobody's editing them. Google's standards shift, browsers update, new phones come out with different screen sizes, new security requirements come in. A website that scored 90+ two years ago might score lower today without anybody having touched it.
The habit worth building is running the audit every quarter. It takes a minute. You'll spot small issues before they grow, you'll have better conversations with whoever maintains your site, and you'll always have a current picture of where things stand.
Run yours now at our Florist Website Audit tool and see where you stand.
A note on what this audit is and isn't.
Our florist website audit is a free tool designed to give you a useful starting point. Scores reflect automated technical checks at the moment the audit is run, and are based on the information publicly available on the page. Results can vary between runs depending on network conditions, server response times, and how the page is loaded.
The audit does not make judgements about your business, your provider, or the quality of any individual website designer or platform. A lower score does not mean a website is bad, and a higher score does not mean a website is perfect. Many factors contribute to a successful florist website, and most of them cannot be measured by an automated tool.
Use the audit as a conversation-starter with your developer or provider, not as a final verdict. If you have concerns about your website's performance, SEO, accessibility or security, we recommend discussing them directly with whoever maintains your site.
If you want to dig deeper into the SEO side, our three-part SEO series covers Google Business Profile, title tags and image alt text, and delivery area pages in practical detail.