The honest version
Most sitters who ask about a website are not worried about the website. They are worried about where the hours come from in a week that is already two rounds of visits a day and a phone that goes at eight in the evening.
So here is the shape of a pet sitting build, stage by stage, with the parts that need you marked clearly.
Total time from you, spread over about six weeks: a first call, one pricing session, one photography morning, and two rounds of feedback. Everything else happens without you.
Stage 1: the first conversation
Half an hour, on the phone or a video call. What we are trying to establish:
- What you take. Cats, dogs, rabbits, chickens, reptiles, and what you turn away.
- What you sell. Drop-ins, standard visits, walks, overnights, house sitting, and the durations attached to each.
- How you price. Per visit, per night, the additional pet rate, and what happens over Christmas and bank holidays.
- Your radius, honestly. Where you can do two visits a day in December without the schedule collapsing.
- What runs your diary now: Time To Pet, Pet Sitter Plus, Scout, Precise Petcare, a spreadsheet, or a phone that never stops.
- Where the work comes from. Google, Instagram, a local Facebook group, the vet, word of mouth.
- The questions you are sick of answering, which for most sitters are what does a week cost, do you have insurance, and who has my keys.
You get a written scope, a price and a date after that call. No lengthy discovery and no workshop. Our tiers are on the pricing page, and for a single-person sitting business the answer is usually the middle one.
Stage 2: prices and areas
This is the only real homework, and it is the piece that changes your inbox, so it is worth the hour.
We send two grids. The first is visit types down the side, with duration, what is included, price and unit in the columns, plus the extras: additional pets, holiday surcharge and dates, medication, key collection. The second is your area list, with a note against each on travel charges and whether you would take a booking there in a busy fortnight.
Two lines cause all the later arguments, so we settle them here: exactly what a night includes, and which dates carry the surcharge. Written on the page in your words, so an invoice is never a surprise.
Both are built as editable records, so you change a rate in two minutes without ringing anyone.
Stage 3: photography and the sample report
Half a morning, arranged around your rounds, ideally on a day with a couple of relaxed regulars in.
What we want: you at work, a cat being fed, a dog on a lead in a recognisable local street, a key safe or a labelled key box, your car if it is branded, and a proper portrait of you. Photographs taken in the places you actually cover do more for area pages than anything else.
While we are there, we capture a sample visit report from your software with a client's permission, or build a realistic example. That single element persuades more nervous owners than any paragraph on the site.
If a photographer is not in the budget, a good phone in daylight is genuinely fine and we will tell you which twelve shots to take.
Stage 4: design direction
We show the home page as a mock-up. You look at it on your phone, collect everyone's comments into one list, and send the list once. We revise, you look again, we revise again, and the direction is agreed. Two rounds, which is plenty when comments arrive together rather than as six texts across four days.
What we are checking at this stage: can an owner see a price, the word insured, and a meet-and-greet button without scrolling.
Stage 5: build
Two to three weeks, and you hear from us twice. The pages, in the order they earn their keep:
Home. Prices and visit types. Trust, meaning insurance, vetting, first aid, references and key handling. Meet-and-greet booking. Cat sitting. Dog visits and walks. Overnight and house sitting. Small animals if you take them. Area pages. Reviews. FAQ. Contact.
The trust page does more work than any other page on a sitting site, so we draft it from the first call and send it to you to correct: your cover, your background check and its date, your first aid course, how keys are labelled, where they are stored and how they come back.
Meanwhile the booking route is wired: one page carrying the request form or the hosted page from your software, a separate client login link for existing clients, and deep links from the price rows and the area pages.
Stage 6: content review
One sitting, about an hour, with everything on screen. You are reading for accuracy rather than for style: are those the prices, is that what a night includes, is that where you actually go, is the surcharge right.
Then a country check on the compliance items: how you describe your insurance and checks, whether any boarding licence applies, cancellation terms at the point of booking, the privacy notice covering addresses and access details, and consent for holiday reminder texts.
Stage 7: launch and the first month
We move the domain, set up the analytics events on booking taps and call taps, connect Google Business Profile, submit the sitemap, and hand over a short recorded walkthrough of how to change a price and add an area page yourself.
Then we watch the first month. Which pages get read, where the booking taps come from, and whether the meet-and-greet route completes on a phone in an in-app browser. Small fixes follow from real behaviour rather than from opinion.
Where this sits
That is how a pet sitting website build runs with us, and the same six-week shape covers the other pet business websites we make. Packages are on pricing. Four hours of your time, spread over six weeks, and the price and keys questions stop arriving by message.