The honest version
Most groomers who ask about a website are not worried about the website. They are worried about how many hours it will take out of a week that already has eight dogs a day in it. So here is the shape of a grooming salon build, stage by stage, with the bits that need you marked clearly.
Total time from you, spread over about six weeks: a first call, one price-table session, one photography morning, and two rounds of feedback. Everything else happens without you.
Stage 1: the first conversation
Half an hour, on the phone or a video call. What we are trying to establish:
- What you groom and what you turn away. Cats? Doodles? Hand stripping? Nervous or elderly dogs?
- How you price. Size bands, coat types, breed examples, and what the add-ons are.
- What you book on now: MoeGo, Gingr, Savvy Pet Spa, Fresha, Booksy, a paper diary, or a phone that never stops.
- Where your work comes from today. Instagram, Google, the sign in the window, the vet down the road.
- The calls you are sick of taking. In nine salons out of ten this is the price call, which is why the price table gets built first.
- Your rebooking interval and whether anything currently goes out at it.
You get a written scope, a price and a date after that call. No lengthy discovery, no workshop. Our tiers are on the pricing page, and for a single-salon groomer the answer is usually the middle one.
Stage 2: the price table
This is the only piece of homework, and it is the piece that changes your phone calls, so it is worth the hour.
We send a grid: size bands with weights down the side, coat types across the top. You fill in the cells and give us two or three breed examples per row, so an owner with a cavapoo can find their dog without knowing what a coat type is. Then the add-ons, priced separately: de-matting by the quarter hour, hand stripping, nails alone, teeth, flea treatment, puppy consultation.
Two lines cause all the arguments later, so we settle them here: what happens to a badly matted coat, and what changes the price on the day. Written on the page, in your words, so the till is never a surprise.
Most groomers do this in one sitting over a coffee. It is built as editable records, so you change a price in two minutes without ringing anyone.
Stage 3: photography
Half a morning, booked around your diary, usually a day with a couple of photogenic regulars in.
What we want: the bath, the table, the dryers, the holding area, the front of the shop, you working, and the team with their own dogs. Real before-and-afters of real clients, with the owner's permission asked properly. Stock photos of a golden retriever on a white background reassure nobody, because every salon has them.
If a photographer is not in budget, a good phone by the window in daylight is genuinely fine, and we will tell you which twelve shots to take.
Stage 4: the design direction
We show the home page as a mock-up. You look at it on your phone, gather everyone's comments into one list, and send the list once. We revise. You look again, we revise again, and the direction is agreed. Two rounds, which is plenty when the comments arrive together rather than as six texts over four days.
What we are checking at this stage: can an owner see a price and a Book button without scrolling, and does the salon look like somewhere calm.
Stage 5: build
Two to three weeks, and you hear from us twice. The pages, in the order they earn their keep:
Home. Services and prices. Book online. Your first groom. Our team. The salon. Reviews. FAQ. Contact.
The first-groom page does more work than any other on a grooming site, so we draft it from the first call and send it to you to correct: vaccination requirements, how long a dog stays, whether they are crated, how you handle nervous dogs and puppies, the muzzle and shave-down policies, your training, insurance and first aid.
Stage 6: wiring the booking
Your platform is configured or checked against the site: services and durations that vary by dog, prices matching the table exactly, the pet profile with vaccination required before a first appointment, the consent forms signed in the flow, the deposit and cancellation terms, and rebooking prompts set per service at your interval.
Then a test dog is booked from a phone, end to end, including inside the Instagram in-app browser, where a lot of your traffic comes from.
Stage 7: review and launch
You get a staging link. Same rule as the design stage: comments consolidated, sent once, two rounds. Read the first-groom page and the price table as if you were an owner, because those are the two that cost you money if they are wrong.
Launch is a quiet weekday morning. We move the domain, keep the old addresses redirecting so nothing you have ever posted on Instagram breaks, submit the sitemap, and watch it for the rest of the day.
Stage 8: the first month
A walkthrough video showing you how to change a price, add a service and swap a photo. Then a check at thirty days on booking clicks and call taps by page, which tells us which service page fills the diary and which one needs a clearer price.
Where this sits
That is the process behind every dog grooming salon website we build, and the same eight stages, with different homework, run behind the other pet business websites we make. The pattern that matters for a groomer: the price table first, real photographs of your own room, and the booking platform wired so vaccination and consent arrive before the dog does.