What we are building
Not a picture of a price list. A small set of records with fields, rendered as a table on a laptop and as stacked cards on a phone, matching the services set up in your scheduling tool, and editable by you in ten minutes when your rates change in January.
The owner arriving on your site is usually mid-holiday-planning. They have a cat, ten days away, and a spreadsheet open. They want to know what ten days costs before they will fill in a single form. This is the build order that answers that.
1. List the visit types you actually sell
Write them out as you sell them, not as a booking system thinks about them. For most sitters that is: a short drop-in, a standard visit, a longer visit or walk, a dog walk on its own, an overnight stay in the owner's home, house sitting, and a puppy or medication visit where you charge for the extra frequency.
Give each one a duration in the name. "Thirty minute visit" tells an owner more than "standard visit" ever will, and it stops the conversation where they assumed an hour.
If you take small animals, rabbits, chickens or fish, they are usually their own visit type at their own length. Say so rather than folding them into cat visits.
2. Decide what the unit is, and be consistent
The single biggest source of confusion on sitting sites is that the price is per visit but the owner is reading it as per day. Cat owners often book two visits a day. Dog owners on an overnight arrangement are buying a night plus visits around it.
Pick your unit, write it in the column header, and repeat it in the note under the table. Per visit, per night, per day. Never mix two units in one column.
3. Price the extras as their own records
Additional pets in the same household. Bank holidays and the Christmas and New Year period, which nearly every sitter surcharges and nearly no website states. Key collection or return where you charge for it. Medication administration. Litter tray deep clean. Plant watering, post and bins, which most sitters include and should say they include.
Each is a separate line with its own unit. "Second cat, per visit" is defensible. "From" is not.
4. Set it in the scheduling tool before the website
Configure the services, durations and rates in Time To Pet, Pet Sitter Plus, Scout or Precise Petcare first, including the holiday surcharge rules and the additional pet rate. Then write the website table from what is in the tool.
In that order, the price on the page is the price the invoice charges. The other way round, the two drift apart within one season and you spend the summer apologising.
5. Model it as records, not a hard-coded table
In the CMS, a price row is a record with fields: visit type, duration, what is included, price, unit, and an optional note. An extra is a record with name, price, unit and description.
The page renders whatever records exist. Add a visit type and a row appears. Raise a rate and the page re-renders. Nobody opens code, and nothing goes stale because a developer was busy.
6. Say what each visit includes
This is where a sitting price table beats a grooming one. Next to each price, in one line: feeding and fresh water, litter tray or garden, medication if simple, play or fuss time, curtains and lights, post and bins, and a photo report sent before you leave.
Owners are not comparing your thirty minutes with another sitter's thirty minutes. They are comparing you with the neighbour who does it for nothing, and the included list is the answer.
7. Write the conditions note underneath
Three short lines settle almost every later argument. What your minimum booking is, if you have one. What the holiday period surcharge is and which dates it covers. How far you travel before a travel charge applies, which ties the table to your area pages.
Add a plain sentence that a meet-and-greet comes first and is free or charged, whichever you do, then link straight to it.
8. Show one worked example
Under the table, a short worked example in words: a cat, two visits a day, seven days, plus the second cat rate. Not a calculator, just the arithmetic done once. It is the single element that stops the most "how much for a week?" messages, because it shows the owner how to do their own sum.
9. Put a booking button in the table
Every row gets its own link to the meet-and-greet booking, so the owner who has just decided on twice-daily cat visits does not have to go looking for the next step. Deep link where your tool allows it.
10. Diarise the review
Rates change once a year and holiday dates change every year. Put a calendar reminder in November to update the records and the surcharge dates, and check the site against the tool while you are there. Ten minutes, once a year, keeps the two honest.
Where this sits
Prices per visit type, with what is included and the extras stated, is one of the six things a pet sitting website has to do, and the same editable-records pattern runs through the other pet business websites we build. Packages are on pricing. Answer the cost question on the page and the enquiry that arrives is already half sold.