✿ Wales's 8x Best Wedding Florist · RHS Chelsea Gold x6

A few specific fixes for hilarysflowers.co.uk

I rebuild small-business sites in my spare time when I can see they are leaving wedding briefs on the table. Three things stood out on a careful read of Hilary's Floral Design on mobile. Three findings below, then a working rebuild you can click through.

Open live preview ↗ Read the three findings Reply to the proposal

Studio · Nantgavenny Lane, Abergavenny NP7 6LG Owner · Hilary Cooke Daughter on the bench · Charlotte Cooke (RHS Chelsea Gold)

Nantgavenny Lane · Abergavenny · mother and daughter on the bench

Eight Welsh National Wedding Awards. Six Chelsea Gold medals. Open the live preview ↗

Three findings, in order of revenue impact

What the current site is leaving on the table.

A walk-through of the live hilarysflowers.co.uk on 18 May 2026.

01

Eight Welsh National Wedding Awards. Six RHS Chelsea Gold medals. None of them is in the meta title.

Observation: Hilary's holds the headline trifecta a wedding florist in the UK can hold: eight consecutive years of "Best Wedding Florist in Wales" at the Welsh National Wedding Awards, six RHS Chelsea Gold medals running, and the 2017 RHS Young Florist of the Year (Hannah-Mae) on the bench. The current homepage compresses all four into a small grey strip below the fold. The page title reads "Hilary's Floral Design, your florist in Abergavenny." The meta description reads "multi award winning florist provides flower arrangements for every occasion." Neither tells Google, neither tells an AI summary, neither tells a bride searching for "best wedding florist Wales" who they have just found.
Revenue impact: A bride in Cardiff or Bristol searching "Welsh National Wedding Awards florist" or "Chelsea Gold wedding florist Wales" sees a snippet that says "multi award winning florist provides flower arrangements" and bounces. The same bride sees a competitor with a sharper headline reading "Wales's eight-time Wedding Florist of the Year, RHS Chelsea Gold" and shortlists them. Wedding briefs at this tier are 1,500 to 4,000 pounds. One brief a month is the difference.
Cause: The current florist-platform template ships a single title slot and a single hero panel. There is no eyebrow surface for credentials, no schema award field, no structured-data block listing the WNWA wins or the Chelsea medals.
After rebuild: After rebuild: "Wales's 8x Best Wedding Florist · RHS Chelsea Gold x6 · Abergavenny" sits in the meta title, in the meta description, in the Open Graph card, and as the eyebrow line above the hero H1. Award schema lists every WNWA year and every Chelsea Gold. The bride searching "best wedding florist Wales" sees a snippet that closes the decision in one line.

02

Mother and daughter on the same bench, both RHS Chelsea Gold medallists. Nowhere named on the homepage.

Observation: Hilary Cooke runs Hilary's. Her daughter Charlotte Cooke is also an RHS Chelsea Gold-winning florist on the team. Hannah-Mae, the 2017 RHS Young Florist of the Year and an RHS Chelsea Gold winner herself, completes the senior creative team. The team's own line, on an earlier version of the About page, was: "We're not only a floral family, we're actually family too." On the current homepage no Cooke is named, no Charlotte, no Hannah-Mae, no portrait, no continuity story.
Revenue impact: Wedding briefs at the 2,000-pound-plus tier are bought on trust before they are bought on style. A bride who can read "Hilary and her daughter Charlotte, both RHS Chelsea Gold medallists, on the design bench" books a consultation. The same bride seeing "our talented team of award-winning artisan florists" closes the tab. Same dynamic for the Monmouthshire and Crickhowell funeral directors who route casket sprays week in, week out: they want to know the principal has not retired. The Cookes are the answer to that question, and the site never gives the answer.
Cause: The florist-platform template has no team-card surface, no Person schema, no founder field. The succession story lives on an /about page that currently returns "This page is currently unavailable" and was never re-promoted to the homepage.
After rebuild: After rebuild: a "Hilary and Charlotte" panel on the homepage. Mother and daughter named, both RHS Chelsea Gold medallists named in the same line. Hannah-Mae named with her 2017 RHS Young Florist of the Year credit. Person schema for each, member-of Hilarys Flowers Limited. The bride searching "family-run wedding florist Wales" sees three named medallists before anyone else.

03

A 728KB un-lazy-loaded hero on jQuery 1.11 and Bootstrap 3. Mobile LCP runs deep into the 4-second range.

Observation: The current homepage hero is a 746KB un-lazy-loaded JPG, served from /upload/mt/hfd184/upload/files/images/panels/. The page chain loads jQuery 1.11.3 unminified, Bootstrap 3 CSS and JS, Font Awesome 4 and Font Awesome 5 alongside, two Google Analytics tags side by side, and Owl Carousel. None of the heavy JS is deferred or async. There is no Open Graph image, no Twitter card, no preload of the hero, no width and height on the hero img tag. On a 4G mobile in the Brecon Beacons the hero takes well over 4 seconds to paint, and shared in WhatsApp the link unfurls blank.
Revenue impact: Two thirds of wedding enquiries this decade arrive on mobile, often on a phone tethered through Crickhowell or Brecon signal. Every 1-second slip in mobile LCP loses measurable conversion: the bride flicks to the next florist. The current site's schema also has the address mangled (Nantgavenny Lane is in addressLocality, Abergavenny is in addressRegion), there is no AggregateRating, no opening-hours schema, and no Open Graph card so the link is invisible in WhatsApp, iMessage and the Welsh wedding Facebook groups where most brief sharing actually happens.
Cause: The site is built on the floristPro platform, a legacy florist CMS targeting Bootstrap 3. Modern image formats (WebP, AVIF), responsive img srcset, native lazy-loading, Open Graph meta, Twitter cards, fixed JSON-LD schema, and proper page-weight discipline are not options the template exposes.
After rebuild: After rebuild: static Astro build deployed on the Vercel edge. Hero served as 90KB WebP with proper width and height. Mobile LCP under 1.2 seconds on 4G. Florist + LocalBusiness + Person + Award + FAQPage JSON-LD with the address corrected. Open Graph card with the hero bouquet, Twitter card, mobile-first. The Brecon-signal bride sees the page paint in one second flat.

Web stack and gaps inventory, May 2026

Current ↗ hilarysflowers.co.uk

Platform: floristPro CMS (Bootstrap 3, jQuery 1.11, Owl Carousel), a late-2010s florist template
Hosting: Shared florist-platform hosting
Email: contact@hilarysflowers.co.uk (already proper)
CMS surface: Single-hero, single-paragraph template, no room for an award strip, no team panel, no Cooke names
SEO: Florist JSON-LD present but with the street address mangled; no opening hours, no AggregateRating, no Open Graph, no Twitter card
Wedding page: /weddings is a single text block with no portfolio, no consultation booking, no lead-time, no award listing
Funeral page: /funeral has no director-form, no chapel-delivery cutoff, no sympathy copy
About page: /about currently returns "This page is currently unavailable"

Proposed

Framework: Astro static site (Astro 6), single page, no client JS framework
Hosting: Vercel edge network, sub-100ms first-byte across the UK
Email: Keep contact@hilarysflowers.co.uk; add weddings@ + funerals@ aliases if useful
CMS surface: Markdown-driven for editorial; small Sanity for bouquets, awards, real-wedding gallery
SEO: Florist + LocalBusiness + Person + Award + Service + FAQPage at build time; address corrected; AggregateRating wired to Google reviews
Wedding page: Dedicated /weddings with portfolio, 8x WNWA strip, consultation booking, lead-time guidance
Funeral page: Dedicated /funeral with discreet form, funeral-director field, chapel-delivery same-day cutoff, sympathy copy
About page: Working /about with Hilary and Charlotte named, Hannah-Mae named, six Chelsea medals listed by year

Build plan

Three weeks. Fixed scope. One round of revisions before launch.

Week 1

Hero rebuild with "Wales's 8x Best Wedding Florist · RHS Chelsea Gold x6" above the fold
Hilary and Charlotte panel, mother and daughter, both Chelsea Gold, named on the homepage
Floral-platform retirement: content audit and migration plan

Week 2

Dedicated /weddings landing page with WNWA strip, real-weddings portfolio, consultation booking
Dedicated /funeral landing page with director-name field and 1pm same-day cutoff
Same-day delivery footprint surfaced with the full Monmouthshire village list

Week 3

Florist + LocalBusiness + Person + Award + Service + FAQPage schema on every page
Open Graph + Twitter card on every page (hero bouquet as the unfurl image)
DNS cutover, old floristPro CMS retired, analytics enabled, launch

Pricing

Fixed price. No retainer. No contract.

Single fixed fee for the full rebuild. No in-person visits, fully remote from Switzerland. One round of revisions before launch. DNS cutover handled (you keep the domain in your name). Thirty days of post-launch tweaks at no extra cost. Source code handed over on day 60. You own everything.

Build

Full Astro rebuild + schema

8x WNWA + 6x Chelsea Gold hero, Hilary and Charlotte panel, /weddings and /funeral landing pages, Florist + LocalBusiness + Person + Award + FAQPage schema, Open Graph card, 22-village delivery footprint copy.

£2,000

one-off · fixed

Care

Monthly hosting and care

Hosting on the Vercel edge, content updates, schema upkeep, monthly Lighthouse and uptime review, copy edits as needed.

£150

per month

Optional

Embedded chatbot

Trained on the FAQ, delivery footprint, same-day cutoff, wedding consultation routing and funeral process. Optional add-on.

£50

per month

Questions answered

FAQ.

What happens to the existing /shop-online checkout, the customer order history and the mailbox?

No customer records ever live on the marketing website. Those sit in the till or POS or wherever Hilary takes payment today. The marketing site moves from the current floristPro CMS to Astro on Vercel. The contact@hilarysflowers.co.uk mailbox stays exactly as it is; if it is on a floristPro mail tier we migrate to Google Workspace at about 6 pounds per mailbox per month with DKIM, SPF and DMARC configured so order confirmation emails always land in the inbox. The current /shop-online flow is preserved on day one (link out to the existing checkout) and revisited in version two if Hilary wants in-house checkout on Stripe.

How is the same-day 1pm cutoff handled in the new booking flow without making the flower-platform redundant?

The new homepage and /shop-online flow keep using the existing florist-platform checkout for orders. The Astro site adds two things the current template cannot: a clean delivery-date picker that respects the 1pm same-day cutoff, and a 22-village delivery footprint copy block (Abergavenny, Blaenavon, Crickhowell, Gilwern, Govilon, Llanover, Raglan, Pandy and the rest of the Monmouthshire list) so a customer in Skenfrith or Llanvihangel Crucorney can see at a glance that yes, you deliver there. No payment processing changes day one.

How are wedding consultations and funeral orders handled differently from generic bouquet orders?

Two dedicated landing pages with their own forms. The wedding form gathers name, wedding date, venue, indicative budget and a free-text brief, and posts to contact@hilarysflowers.co.uk only. No third-party form processor, no reCAPTCHA fingerprint. The funeral form is gentler: name, funeral director, chapel or venue, date and time, free-text request. Both forms time out the back-end and the email logs after 90 days so the data does not accumulate.

How does the rebuild compete against Interflora and the Monmouthshire chains on the local queries?

It does not compete on the Interflora marketing budget. That is a losing battle. It competes on three things: award credentials (eight Welsh National Wedding Awards, six RHS Chelsea Gold medals, the 2017 RHS Young Florist of the Year, facts no chain can match), geography (Abergavenny + Crickhowell + Monmouthshire anchor copy that beats every chain on local-intent searches), and schema citation (Florist + LocalBusiness + Person + Award + Service markup so AI assistants cite Hilary's for "best wedding florist Wales", "Chelsea Gold florist", "wedding florist Abergavenny", "funeral florist Crickhowell"). Interflora wins the 40-pound next-day bouquet to a relative in Manchester. Hilary's wins the 2,500-pound wedding brief and the funeral-director relationship.

The close

If the proposal lands, reply with two or three 20-minute slots in the next ten days for a video call. I take on three South Wales builds this quarter, and first confirmed wins the slot. If I do not hear back by 28 May 2026, the proposal site comes down.

See the live rebuild ↗

A working preview you can click through.

Opens in this tab.