3 July 2026 · The Flower Trade
While building the florist directory on this site we ended up with a list of 27,151 independent flower shops that publish a website address. Checking whether those addresses still work turned out to be a more interesting exercise than we expected, and the results say something about the state of the independent trade.
Every address was checked twice, on different days, and only the ones that failed both times were counted as dead. That matters more than it sounds. On the first pass a number of sites were unreachable that were perfectly fine two days later, and on a single reading those businesses would have been written off wrongly.
We also checked DNS against more than one resolver, because a single resolver reported thousands of domains as non-existent that a second one resolved without complaint. Anybody running this kind of check on one source is getting an error rate they cannot see.
Roughly one in five was gone. 5,384 of the 27,151 failed on both days, which is just under twenty percent of the independent shops in the dataset that ever bothered to put a website up.
That number on its own is sad but not surprising. Shops close, and a domain lapses quietly a year or two afterward. What was surprising was the next category.
Of the addresses that still resolved and returned a perfectly healthy page, 396 were no longer the florist. The domain had lapsed, been picked up by somebody else, and now pointed somewhere entirely unrelated.
Where those 396 now lead breaks down roughly like this:
The eighty are the ones worth pausing on. A shop closes, the domain expires, somebody in the same trade buys it, and every old business card, every printed van, every link from a directory built years ago now sends that shop's former customers to a competitor. It is entirely legal and it is quietly effective.
The reason this is not common knowledge is that every one of those 396 addresses works perfectly. Type it in and a page loads. Any automated check that asks only whether a server responded will mark all of them healthy, and most directory software asks exactly that and nothing more.
Catching it means following the redirect to see where it actually lands, and then deciding whether the destination is still the business you started with. That is a harder question than it sounds, because plenty of legitimate florists hand their online ordering to a wire service, so an address that ends up on a third-party site is not automatically wrong. It is only wrong when the name on the destination is somebody else's.
The obvious lesson is about renewal. A domain is the cheapest asset a small business owns and the easiest one to lose by accident, usually because it was registered by somebody who has since left, on a card that has since expired, using an email address nobody checks. Auto-renewal on a card that is current is a ten minute job.
The less obvious lesson is about the ones you have already let go. If your shop has changed name, or you moved from one domain to another and quietly stopped paying for the old one, that old address may still be carrying customers. It is worth typing it in and seeing where it lands now.
Every address that failed twice is hidden on this directory rather than deleted, because domains do come back and we would rather restore a link than recreate one. The ones that now point at a different business are hidden too. Sending somebody looking for a specific florist to that florist's competitor is worse than showing no link at all, and a listing that does that is not a listing, it is a redirect with somebody else's name on it.
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