The two things Time To Pet gives a website
Time To Pet is pet sitting software, and from a website's point of view there are two owner-facing pieces worth wiring up.
The new client request. A form or hosted page where a prospective client gives their details, their pets and the dates they are thinking about, landing in your queue rather than your inbox. This is what the meet-and-greet button should reach.
The client portal. Where existing clients log in to request dates, read visit reports and pay invoices. This is a header link, not a widget.
Everything else Time To Pet does, scheduling, routing, invoicing, the sitter app, happens after the booking and never touches your pages. Feature detail changes release to release, so confirm the specifics of any embed, hosted page or link option with Time To Pet before building a page around it.
The rule: nothing third party loads until the owner acts
The mistake is putting an embed in the footer of every page. A sitting site is mostly read rather than booked. The price table, the trust page, the sample visit report, the area pages and the reviews do the persuading. Loading a third-party script on all of them slows the pages that convert for the benefit of the one page that submits.
So: one page carries the embed. Every other page links to it.
The request page
Give it a plain address such as /book, and put nothing on it but the form, three reassuring lines, the phone number and your hours. Reserve the height before the form arrives so the page does not jump, and preconnect to the vendor's domain in the head:
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://www.timetopet.com">
<div class="booking-embed" style="min-height: 720px"><!-- Time To Pet request form embed --></div>Above the form, the three lines that stop the messages you get most: that this books a meet-and-greet rather than the dates themselves, whether the meeting is free, and what you will ask for afterwards. Below it, the cancellation window. Do not repeat the price table here, link back to it.
If the embed misbehaves, point the buttons at the hosted page on Time To Pet's domain instead. A hosted page that works beats a widget that half works.
Existing clients need a different door
Regulars should never go through the new client request again. Put a small Client login link in the header, separate from the big Book a meet-and-greet button, pointing at your portal address.
One is for strangers, one is for the people who already have your key. Sitting sites that use a single button for both get holiday requests submitted as new enquiries and lose the client history.
Configure Time To Pet before the site points at it
- Services, durations and rates for every visit type, matching the price table on the site exactly. An invoice that contradicts the page costs more goodwill than a missing feature.
- Additional pet rates and holiday surcharges, with the surcharge dates set for the year ahead and written on the page in the same words.
- Client and pet profile fields: vet practice and phone, emergency contact, medication, feeding, access, alarm codes and key details.
- The service agreement signed in the flow, covering cancellation, emergency vet authority, key handling and photo permission.
- Visit report settings, so photos and a check-in and check-out time go out every visit. This is the product, so do not leave it optional.
- Invoicing and card payments where they are available in your country.
- Notifications to the phone you actually watch between visits, and an out-of-hours expectation stated on the site.
Then submit a test request from your own phone and delete it afterwards.
The header does not change
The software does not reorganise the site. Every page still carries the phone number, Book a meet-and-greet, and, for nervous owners, the trust page. On phones, a slim bar fixed to the bottom with Call and Book. An owner worried about who has their keys wants the proof page first and the button second.
Testing, especially in-app browsers
A lot of sitting traffic arrives from a link in an Instagram bio, and Instagram's in-app browser is not Safari. Test the whole route there and in Facebook's, plus Safari and Chrome on iOS and Android: open the form, fill it, submit it, receive the confirmation, then open the profile link from that confirmation and complete it.
Repeat monthly. Platforms update their hosted pages, and you would rather find a broken step than hear about it from an owner who gave up and messaged somebody else.
Tracking
Add a booking_click event on every meet-and-greet tap with the page as a parameter, and a call_click on every tap-to-call. Once a month, compare taps by page against requests received. That tells you whether the price table, the trust page or an area page is what actually fills your diary, and which page to improve next.
Common mistakes
- The embed on every page, slowing the trust page for everyone who is only reading.
- Website prices drifting away from the rates in the software after a January rate rise.
- One button for new and existing clients, so regulars re-register every summer.
- Holiday surcharge dates set in the software and never written on the page.
Where this sits
Time To Pet is the platform we wire in most often on a pet sitting website, and the pattern is the one we use across pet business websites: one booking page, links from everywhere else, the phone and the proof ahead of both, tracking on everything. Packages are on pricing. The software holds the client. The site's job is to get them into it in one tap.