How I Rebuilt Critter Care's Website from Scratch

I launched a new website for my friend’s pet sitting business a few days ago. Wanted to write about it while the whole thing is still fresh in my head.

My friend Laurie has run Critter Care, a pet sitting and dog walking business in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, since 1999. I used to live in Lawndale, right around the corner from her. Our dogs played together all the time. At some point I became her unofficial webmaster, and for the last five or six years she’d send me a little money here and there to make edits on her IONOS site. The editor was a clunky drag-and-drop thing from another era. Every time I logged in I’d think, this would be so much better if I just rebuilt it from scratch.

She was paying IONOS about $18 a month for hosting and their site builder. On top of that, somewhere along the way IONOS had talked her into an SEO package for an extra $35 a month. She’d been paying that for who knows how long, and as far as I could tell, it wasn’t doing anything. No structured data on the site. No meta descriptions. No sign of any optimization work at all. Fifty-three dollars a month for a site that hadn’t been meaningfully updated in years.

I’d been talking about rebuilding it for years. This past Super Bowl weekend, I finally sat down and did it.

The Old Site

To Laurie’s credit, she had a website at all. That alone puts her ahead of plenty of small business owners. She’d set it up herself in the IONOS builder, and the content was actually solid: photos of her with the animals, descriptions of every service she offers, testimonials from real clients. The right stuff was there. She’d been running the business for 25 years. She knew what her customers needed to see.

The site had a dark theme with a header photo of dogs playing in the yard. The homepage doubled as a services page, with a cartoon caricature banner somebody had drawn for her years back.

After

Before

The about page had everything you’d want to know about Laurie and the business: background, qualifications, photos with the animals. It just needed better structure and a layout that didn’t fight you when you tried to read it.

After

Before

The hire-us page is my favorite comparison. The old version had a downloadable Word document for the service contract. A .doc file. You were supposed to print it, sign it, and bring it to an introductory meeting. The new version walks people through the process step by step, and the contract is a PDF right on the page.

After

Before

I grabbed the old screenshots from the Wayback Machine before the old site went down, which is the only reason I can show the contrast at all.

The Weekend Build

Saturday morning I went through every page of the old site and pulled everything out: the copy, the photos, service descriptions, pricing, testimonials. Then I started rebuilding it in Astro, mobile first and working up. Each page got restructured around what people actually visit a pet sitter site to find: what services are available, what they cost, how to get in touch.

Laurie’s services and prices were on the old site, but buried in paragraph text. I pulled them out into individual cards with the price, duration, and a one-line description. You can scan the page in five seconds and know exactly what everything costs.

Then I went through every page and did the SEO. This is the part that still bugs me about her old setup. She was paying $35 a month for an SEO package that did nothing. The new site has Schema.org markup for the business type and the services offered. Proper meta tags on every page. An XML sitemap. All baked in from day one, because that’s just how you build a website in 2026. It shouldn’t cost extra.

Sunday I spent a few hours during the game polishing things up. Mobile was the big focus. The old site was built for desktop browsers. On a phone you had to pinch and zoom to read anything. Over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile now, and for a local service business like pet sitting it’s almost certainly higher than that. People search for pet sitters from the couch with a dog on their lap. Here’s what that difference looks like:

After

Before

Laurie had tons of great photos of herself with the dogs and cats she takes care of. I used those throughout the site instead of stock images. A real photo of Laurie holding someone’s dog builds way more trust than a stock photo of a smiling person in scrubs. People want to see who’s actually going to be in their house with their pets.

I also set up Decap CMS so Laurie can update her own content without calling me every time she needs to change a price or add a testimonial. She logs in, edits text, uploads photos, hits publish. She doesn’t need to know what’s happening behind the scenes.

About an hour after the game ended I sent Laurie an email with a Netlify deploy preview. Hosted on the free tier, with her only cost being the $20/year domain renewal on Squarespace (which was actually $5 for the first year with a promo). She was thrilled. The new site went live about a week later, once IONOS finally transferred the domain over.

The Technical Stack

For anyone who wants to peek under the hood:

• Astro for static site generation. HTML is generated at build time, so there’s nothing to compute on each visit.
• Vanilla CSS with custom properties for theming. No framework, no utility classes, just stylesheets.
• Netlify for hosting and form processing. The free tier handles everything a site this size needs.
• Zero JavaScript frameworks on the client. No React, no Vue, nothing. The browser gets HTML and CSS. That’s it.
• WebP images resized for the web. No 4000px photos loading on a 400px phone screen.
• Semantic HTML with proper heading hierarchy, landmark elements, and alt text on every image.

The site loads in under a second. Not a benchmark number from a lab, real-world, on a normal connection, the page is rendered before you can blink. Astro makes this nearly free because there’s no JavaScript to download and parse before the page can render. The HTML arrives, the browser shows it.

The Money Part

The rebuild itself was free because Laurie is a friend and I wanted the portfolio piece. If I were pricing this as a client project, a site like Critter Care would land somewhere in the $1,500 to $2,500 range. Straightforward business site, handful of pages, no e-commerce, no complicated integrations. I break down what affects pricing here.

But look at what Laurie was paying before:

• IONOS hosting: $18/month
• IONOS SEO package: $35/month
• Total: $53/month, or $636/year

The new site’s hosting on Netlify’s free tier: $0/month. The SEO is built into the site itself. Over three years that’s $1,908 she would have spent on a setup that wasn’t helping her. Even at the high end of what I’d charge for this kind of site, the rebuild pays for itself in under four years just from the monthly savings. And that’s before you factor in the value of actually having a site that works on phones and shows up in search results.

The Result

The new Critter Care site:

• Loads in under 1 second (the old site took 4+ seconds)
• Works on phones the way you’d expect a site to work in 2026
• Has structured pricing you can scan in seconds
• Has proper SEO with structured data and meta tags
• Costs $0/month to host (down from $53/month)
• Has a CMS so Laurie can update it herself

If you want to see it live, here it is: critter-care.com.

When I showed Laurie the new site, her reaction said it all:

“That’s fabulous! I love it! I really appreciate you and the time you’re spending on this and saving me money. Please move forward with it ASAP!”

— Laurie, Critter Care owner

Sound Familiar?

Laurie’s situation isn’t unusual. Plenty of small business owners are paying $40 to $75 a month for a builder plus some SEO package, on a site that hasn’t meaningfully changed in years. It exists, technically. It just isn’t doing anything for the business. And in some cases they’re paying for “services” that don’t actually deliver. If you’ve ever wondered what should be in a real maintenance plan, I broke that down here: what’s worth paying for, what isn’t, and how to tell.

If that sounds like your setup, it’s probably worth a conversation. I build websites for small businesses in Denver, Lakewood, and the Colorado Front Range. I’ll look at your current site for free and tell you honestly what it would take to fix it. If you’re on the fence about whether you even need work done, I wrote about the signs that it’s time for a redesign.

Let’s talk about your project →

I serve small businesses across the Denver Front Range: Denver, Lakewood, Golden, Littleton, Boulder, Arvada, Aurora, Westminster, and Highlands Ranch.