The symptom
The site gets visitors. The phone still rings all spring with the same three questions: can I come and see the pens, how much for two cats for ten nights, and what jabs does she need. Meanwhile June and October have empty pens and August filled two weeks later than last year.
That is not a traffic problem. Traffic arrived and left without booking. Here are the seven usual reasons, in the order worth fixing them.
1. The owner cannot see where the cat will sleep
This is the first and biggest. A cat owner is not buying a service, she is choosing a room. If the site has one gallery of eight mixed photographs, she cannot tell what a pen is, whether it has an outdoor bit, whether it is heated, or how close the next cat is.
The fix is a set of photographs per pen type: the sleeping area with bedding in it, the run from the outside, the view the cat has, the heating, and the gap between pens. Caption each one in plain words. Filmed as one slow walk along the pens is even better, hosted on YouTube or Vimeo with a poster image so it does not slow the page.
2. There is no price for the stay she is actually booking
"Prices on request" reads as expensive. A single nightly figure with no multi-cat rate reads as a guess. She has two cats and needs ten nights, and she wants that number before she rings anyone.
Publish a table: pen types down the side, price per night, and the rate for a second and third cat from the same home. Add peak dates if they are priced differently, and say what a day counts as, arrival and collection windows included. That table answers the call before it happens.
3. Requirements are not stated, so booking feels risky
Vaccination requirements with the timing, flea and worm treatment, and what to bring. If those are missing, an owner with a booster due does not know whether she can book, so she rings instead. Some of them do not ring.
State them on the site, then confirm and store them at the point of booking. Both, not either.
4. Booking is a link to somewhere else, or a form that nobody answers
If the site says "email us for availability", peak season is being sold by inbox. If the button throws her onto a portal on another domain with different branding, a good share of people stop there.
Embed the booking from Revelation Pets, Gingr, PetExec or Kennel Connection on your own page, deep-linked so the pen type she was reading about is already selected. If you take requests rather than instant bookings, say so plainly and say how fast you reply.
5. The gallery makes the site take five seconds on a phone
Cattery sites are photograph-heavy by nature, which is right, and then somebody uploads forty images straight off a camera. On a phone on rural mobile data, the page never really arrives, and she has gone back to the results.
Resize and compress, serve modern formats, lazy-load everything below the first screen, and put the video behind a poster image. The target is under two seconds on a mid-range phone.
6. The routine and the medication answer are missing
The owners hardest to win are the ones with an elderly cat, a diabetic cat or a cat on daily medication, and they are also the ones who book longest and return most.
A routine page fixes it: what happens through the day, how often someone is with the cats, cleaning, feeding, how medication is given, how it is recorded, what happens if a cat stops eating, and which vet you use. Write it as you would say it at the gate.
7. Nobody knows what the site produced
No tracking on booking clicks or call taps, so every fix above is guesswork and the argument about the website goes on forever.
Track the booking button and the phone number by page. After a season you know whether the pen pages or the prices page produces stays, and which pen type sells out first.
The order
Do it in this order, because each step makes the next one worth more.
- Pen photographs and captions, by pen type.
- The price table with the multi-cat rate.
- Requirements stated with timing.
- Booking embedded and deep-linked.
- Speed, images and video.
- The routine and medication page.
- Tracking on the buttons.
One and two are a weekend of your own time with a phone camera and your price list. They are also where most of the loss is.
Test it yourself
Stand outside, on your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi. Time how long the home page takes. Then find, as a stranger would: what a family pen looks like inside, what ten nights costs for two cats, what vaccinations are needed and when, and how to hold the dates. If any of those takes more than a few taps, you have found the reason for this morning's phone calls.
Where this sits
Pen photography, priced pen types, stated requirements and embedded booking are how we build a cattery website, and the same conversion work runs through the rest of our pet business websites. The packages are on pricing. The empty pens in October are usually the same problem as the phone calls in April.