Best means booked, and booked again
There is no award for cattery websites, and if there were, it would go to the wrong one. The best cattery site is the one that takes a stay from a woman who has never boarded her cat before, at half past ten at night, without a phone call, and then takes the same booking every August for nine years.
Look at enough of them and the good ones share the same eight things. None of the eight is a design trend.
1. Every pen type shown, inside and out
Not a gallery. A set per pen type: the sleeping area with bedding, the outdoor run photographed from outside so the size reads, the view from inside, the heating, and the space between pens. Captions in plain words saying what the space is and what it holds. The best add a slow walk along the pens on video, hosted externally with a poster image.
2. A price per night that survives contact with a real booking
Pen types down the side, price per night, second and third cat from the same home, peak dates if they differ, and what a day means, with arrival and collection windows. An owner with two cats and ten nights can get her number in one look.
3. Requirements stated before the booking, not at the gate
The vaccination course and how long before arrival it has to be done, flea and worm treatment, and what to bring. Written as content on the site so an owner can check whether she is eligible tonight, then confirmed and stored when she books.
4. A routine page written like a conversation
Feeding, cleaning, how often someone is in with the cats, what happens if a cat will not eat, how medication is given and recorded, and which vet is used. This is the page that wins the owner of a fifteen-year-old cat on daily thyroid tablets, and that owner books for ten nights twice a year for the rest of the cat's life.
5. Booking in one tap, with the pen already chosen
Revelation Pets, Gingr, PetExec or Kennel Connection embedded on the site rather than linked away, deep-linked so the pen type she was reading about is preselected, carrying vaccination and medication into the record. If the cattery takes requests rather than instant bookings, the page says so and says how quickly it replies.
6. Honest availability at peak
The best sites do not let August look bookable in July when it is not. Either the calendar shows it gone, or there is a waiting list that actually collects an email. An owner who is told plainly that the week is full and is offered the next one often takes the next one. An owner who fills in a form into silence goes elsewhere and does not come back next year.
7. Licence, inspection rating and reviews where the eye lands
Where catteries are licensed, the licence and any inspection rating go near the booking area rather than in the footer, because that is exactly the reassurance an anxious owner is looking for. Google reviews beside the buttons, real ones, with names. Insurance stated. Nothing dressed up.
8. Fast on a phone on rural data
Cattery sites are image-heavy for good reasons, and the good ones stay under two seconds anyway: compressed modern image formats, sized to the slot, lazy loading below the first screen, video behind a poster image, booking scripts loaded only where booking happens.
What the best ones do not share
They do not share a look. Some are warm and homely, some are clinical and precise, and both work because both are true to the place. They tend not to use stock photographs of cats, ever. They rarely have a slider on the home page. And none of them opens with a paragraph about how the business was founded in 1994, because the owner reading it wants to know about her cat, not about you. The story belongs further down, where it does its job as reassurance rather than as a barrier.
Test yours against the eight
Take your phone outside, off the office wifi, and go through it as a stranger with two cats and a fortnight in Portugal.
- Can I see, in photographs, what my cat will sleep in and what the run looks like.
- Can I price ten nights for two cats without ringing.
- Do I know what vaccinations she needs and by when.
- Do I know what a day is like and how tablets are given.
- Can I book, or make a real request, in a couple of taps.
- Is August honest.
- Can I see the licence and some reviews.
- Did the page arrive in under two seconds.
Six or more and you have a good site with gaps. Four or fewer and the phone calls you take every spring are the site talking to you.
Where this sits
Those eight are the specification we build to on a cattery website, and the same standard runs through the rest of our pet business websites with the packages on pricing. The best cattery site in your area is probably not the prettiest one. It is the one that answered all eight questions before anybody picked up a phone.