The symptom
The site gets visitors from Google and from the link in your Instagram bio. You still spend an hour every evening answering messages asking when the next puppy course starts, whether you take reactive dogs, and what you charge. Online registrations stay low. People are finding the site and not booking from it.
On training business sites we look at, the cause is on this list, usually three or four at once. Work through them in order. The first three are the path from an owner's question to a place in your class or a slot in your diary.
1. The site cannot tell them when the next course starts
This is the big one. "Puppy classes run regularly, contact us for dates" is not an answer. An owner with a twelve week old puppy has a narrow window and knows it. If your site cannot say Tuesday the fourteenth, seven o'clock, village hall, two places left, they will find a trainer whose site can.
Fix: a live timetable from TeamUp, Bookeo or Acuity showing each course, its start date, day and time, venue, the age or ability it suits, the price of the block and how many places remain. Not a PDF. Not a paragraph. A list that updates itself when someone books.
2. The two customers are not separated
Puppy owners and owners with a behaviour problem want opposite things, and most sites make them share a services page. The owner whose rescue lunges at other dogs scrolls past photographs of puppies playing, decides you are a puppy class business, and leaves.
Fix: two routes on the first screen. Classes and courses on one side, behaviour help on the other, each with its own page and its own booking. It takes an afternoon and it is usually the biggest single change on a training site.
3. Book is not one tap from where they are standing
Owners look you up on a phone, one handed, often while the dog is doing the thing that made them search. If Book is inside a menu, or opens a generic contact form, or lands them on a platform page where they have to find your business again, most are gone.
Fix: a Book button in the header on every page, deep linked to the right service so the class page opens class registration and the behaviour page opens the consult. A tappable phone number beside it. Test the whole thing inside the Instagram in app browser.
4. There is no answer to the methods question
Owners now arrive having read about training approaches, and a good share of them have decided what they will not have done to their dog. A site that says only that you love dogs makes them keep looking.
Fix: a methods and qualifications page. Your approach in plain words, the assessments and qualifications behind it, the professional bodies you belong to, what a class session actually looks like from arrival to end, and what a behaviour consult involves. This page wins the clients you want and filters out the ones who will fight you.
5. Prices are missing
Classes, one to one sessions, behaviour assessments, follow ups and packages all need numbers. Withholding them does not create an enquiry, it creates a comparison with the trainer down the road who published theirs.
Fix: prices for each thing you sell, held as editable records so you can change them in January without a developer. If a behaviour case genuinely cannot be quoted without an assessment, publish the assessment price and say plainly what follow ups cost.
6. The behaviour enquiry arrives empty
You get a message that says "my dog is aggressive, can you help". Three emails later you know the dog's age, that there is a bite history, and that the vet has not been consulted. Half of those threads go cold before they become a booking.
Fix: an intake questionnaire attached to the consult booking. The dog, age, breed, how long they have had him, the behaviour and when it happens, what has been tried, the vet's details and consent to contact them, and whether there is a bite history. State clearly when a vet referral is needed first.
7. The site is slow on a phone
Training sites collect video: class clips, recall demonstrations, before and after reels. Unoptimised, they push a phone page past four seconds and a good share of visitors never see the timetable.
Fix: images sized and compressed, video lazy loaded and never auto playing in the hero, no slider, Core Web Vitals Good on mobile.
8. Nothing on the page says other owners trusted you
Reviews are the cheapest reassurance on a training site and they are usually buried on a page nobody visits.
Fix: pull Google reviews onto the class page and the behaviour page, near the booking buttons, with names and dates. Add the venue, your insurance, your memberships and a photograph of the actual hall.
The order to do them in
Timetable first, then the two routes, then one tap booking. Those three are the funnel. Methods and prices next, because they are what an owner reads before they commit. Intake, speed and reviews after. Track registrations, consult bookings and call taps by page before you start, so you can see which fix moved which number.
Where this sits
All eight are standard in a dog training and behaviour website as we build it, and the same conversion work runs through our other pet business websites. The packages are on pricing. The evening inbox is not a fact of the job. It is a list of the questions your website has not answered yet.