Mistakes to Avoid on Your Website: The 3 Most Common Mistakes + Solutions You Can Do Yourself
Kami Martin, floral website expert and Director of One Clique at Flower Clique, recently analyzed the websites of more than 70 retail florists — and the same three mistakes kept popping up over and over. The good news? Every one of them has a simple solution you can tackle yourself, and Kami joined Vonda and Lori to walk through exactly how.
Mistake #1: Taking your website straight out of the box
Most floral website platforms — Teleflora, FTD, FSN, Media99 and the like — give you a solid foundation: a working checkout, good templates, real self-administration tools. The problem is what happens next: nothing. Shop owners dust off their hands, say "I've got a website," and walk away with a site that looks exactly like the competitor up the street, just with a different name and phone number plugged in.
Kami's first fix is the about us page. The platforms hand you a placeholder fully expecting you to update it, and very few florists ever do. Add photos of your staff, awards you've won, even a quick iPhone video tour of the shop. Tell your story — why you became a florist, what you love about it. As Lori put it, she always reads the about page before she buys: she wants to see the people and the shop, because those connection points make the sale easier. Bonus: that fresh, local content also helps your search ranking when Google is splitting hairs between you and a competitor on the same platform.
Then move to the home page — the front door of your business online. Add a banner with personality, a photo of your storefront so locals think "that's the shop I drive by all the time," and seasonal features. Out-of-town buyers get proof you're a real shop, not an order gatherer. Round it out with gift bundles (think a "Wine Not" basket or a tea-lovers set, all photographed on a consistent background), a couple of local sentences added to your best-selling product descriptions, and simple city pages — "Florist in [Town]" categories filled with eight year-round designs and natural mentions of the hospitals and funeral homes you deliver to.
Mistake #2: Believing more is better
One shop's anniversary category alone had more than 90 products on it — and that wasn't even all of them. That endless scroll overwhelms customers (the classic paradox of choice), and it sets your team up to fail: no shop stocks enough flower varieties and containers to fulfill all of that same-day, and no new salesperson can learn a website that size.
The solution is to simplify and use smart crossover. The same dozen roses can live in birthday, anniversary, and best sellers. The same recipe can appear as a standard in best sellers, deluxe in birthday, and premium in anniversary. Start with your home page — it's your number one seller — and work through the categories from there. As Vonda says: have what you sell, sell what you have. A clean, on-brand website has another payoff, too — customers trust your style enough to happily order designer's choice.
Mistake #3: Assuming your website prices are profitable
Wholesale flower prices are higher than the hosts have ever seen, and the designs loaded onto your website were not priced for today's market. That is not your platform's responsibility to fix — it's yours. Vonda ran the math on air: if one arrangement is underpriced by $25 and your web order volume has doubled, you are giving away serious revenue on every single order. There's a difference between being busy and being profitable, and Kami sees it monthly in shop numbers: the stores that repriced correctly are up in revenue even when order counts are flat, because their average order value climbed.
Key takeaways
- Customize your about us page with photos, story, and awards — once it's done, it's done, and it helps both customers and search engines.
- Treat your home page like your front door: storefront photo, banner, personality, seasonal features.
- Trim overloaded categories and reuse the same flowers across categories at different sizes and price points.
- Re-price your website designs against current wholesale costs, with markup and labor included — don't give money away.
- If the tech intimidates you, write the content and email it to your website provider — or let the One Clique Program do it for you.
Want more? Join the Business and Pleasure of Flowers community, and keep an eye on enrollment for Sales Prep School and Flower Prep School.