A cattery customer is measured in nights, not visits
A groomer wins a client and sees the dog eight times a year. A cattery wins a customer and sees the cat for two weeks in August, a week at Easter and a few nights at Christmas, then does it again for as long as the cat lives. One new regular family is a run of nights repeated over a decade, and the peak weeks they occupy are the weeks you cannot sell twice.
That is what makes the template question worth thinking about rather than answering by price. The difference between the two options is not how the site looks. It is whether a stranger who has never left her cat anywhere decides on your pens rather than the cattery ten minutes further on.
The template
A pet or boarding theme, your logo, a photo grid, a contact form and a link to your booking portal. Squarespace, Wix, or a WordPress theme.
It gets you online in days for a few hundred, or a few thousand if someone dresses it for you. It is usually adequate to prove you exist, and if your August is already full from returning customers, that may be all you need.
What a template struggles with is the specific work a cattery site has to do. Pen types as their own priced, photographed, bookable things rather than one gallery. A price table by pen and number of cats that you can edit yourself in January without opening a support ticket. Booking embedded with vaccination and medication captured, not a link that throws the owner onto another domain. A routine page. Requirements with timing. Speed on a phone once the pen gallery is loaded, which is where most template cattery sites quietly fail.
The custom build
Built around the decision the owner is making. Every pen type gets its own photographs inside and out, its nightly price, its multi-cat rate and a booking button that arrives at the software with that pen already chosen. The routine page says what a day is and how medication is given and recorded. Requirements are stated with timing and repeated at booking. The licence and inspection rating sit where owners look. Reviews sit beside the buttons. The pages are structured so a search engine can tell what you are and where you are, the images are sized so the gallery does not cost you three seconds, and the domain and hosting are in your name.
It costs several thousand and takes weeks rather than days. That is the honest trade.
Where the extra nights come from
Four places, and none of them is the design.
Search. A template on a shared subdomain with one page called "Services" is competing badly for cat boarding plus your town. A structured site with a page per pen type and a proper local foundation is not.
The pens. Owners who can see the sleeping shelf, the run, the heating and the space between pens book. Owners who see one blurry photo of a corridor ring three catteries and pick on tone of voice.
The requirements. Vaccination timing stated on the site removes the drop-off argument and the cancelled stay, and it also removes the phone call that was standing in for it.
Peak. Availability that is honest in July, and a booking flow that works at eleven at night, is the difference between selling the August weeks in June and selling them in a scramble.
The arithmetic
Do it with your own numbers rather than anyone's percentages. Take your average stay value and multiply by the number of stays a returning family gives you over five years. Now ask how many additional families a year would pay for the difference between a template and a build. For most catteries that number is small and countable on one hand, which is the whole argument. It is also why the template is genuinely right for some catteries and a slow leak for others.
When the template is right
You are new and the pens are not all finished. You take under ten cats. Your season fills from a village noticeboard and the same twenty families. You want to trade for a year and see. Put a template up, make sure the phone number and the address are correct, and spend the money on the pens instead.
When the template is a leak
You have capacity in June and October that never sells. You take price and vaccination calls all spring. Your August fills late and you can feel it. Owners tell you they nearly went elsewhere because they could not see the pens. You have more than one pen type and the site describes them in a paragraph. Any two of those, and the template is costing you more each season than the build costs once.
Deciding
Open your own site on your phone, standing outside, and try to answer as a stranger: what will my cat sleep in, what does a week cost for two cats, what vaccinations does she need and by when, and can I hold the dates now. If you cannot get all four in under a minute, the question is no longer template or custom. It is what the missing minute costs you every August.
Where this sits
Our cattery websites are the custom side of that choice at a fixed price, with pen pages, the routine and requirements content and embedded booking, and the wider approach sits on the pet business page. If the template is doing the job for now, keep it and revisit when your quiet months stay quiet.