How to make a dog breeder website that finds the right homes

TL;DR: How to make a dog breeder website

This guide covers everything a working breeder needs, starting with a domain and a template. You'll then add the five pages buyers look for: available puppies, your dogs, health testing, your story and your contact details. It also explains how to list the services you offer beyond puppies, such as your waiting list, stud services, go-home packs and how far you're willing to travel for delivery. You'll learn how to photograph the sire and dam, your whelping setup and each litter as it grows week by week. Yola's website builder includes a ready-made Galleries block, so each litter can have its own gallery, plus Services and Pricing blocks that let you update a stud fee or puppy price in a couple of minutes.

The second half is the part that filters. You add a puppy application form asking about the household, other pets, the yard and which litter they are hoping for, you put your health testing, your breed club membership and your contract where they can be read before anybody applies, you keep a page of expected and past litters current by hand, and you write for "[breed] breeder [state]" rather than your town, because buyers will drive for a breeder. Work through the ten steps and the applications that reach you come from families who already read the hip scores.

What to include

Top features of a dog breeder website

How to make a dog breeder
website in 10 steps

Your domain is the name people repeat to each other. For most breeders that is the kennel name already on your registration papers, and it should be spelled on the site exactly the way it appears there and on your pedigrees. Take the .com while it is free, because that is still what somebody types when they half remember a name from a show catalog or from a friend at the dog park.

Leave out hyphens and numbers. Somebody says your kennel name out loud at a breed club meeting, the other person types it into a phone, and the hyphen goes missing every time. Where the kennel name is long or already taken, the breed plus your own name usually works, and adding your state is fine if you sell across a wide radius. Whatever you register, use the same spelling on your Google Business Profile, on your breed club listing and on the contract that goes home with every puppy.

Yola website builder lets you search for and register a domain in the same flow you build the site in, and annual plans include a free domain for the first year.

None of this needs code. Yola lets you edit text, swap photos and move sections yourself, the same way you would edit a document, so a litter goes up the day it is born instead of the week somebody else has time to look at it.

Answer a few questions about your breed and how you run your program, and Yola's AI Website Builder hands back a first draft to work from. The free plan has basic AI and the full set of AI tools sits on the paid plans, so treat whatever comes back as a rough shape and check every line about health testing, prices and your contract against what you actually do. Hosting, an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups come with the site. Starting from a template that already has a gallery, a services layout and a contact form means you are editing a page rather than designing one.

Start from a template

Dog breeder website templates

Six pages carry nearly all of it. Two very different visitors land on a breeder's site: a family who has settled on the breed and is now working out which breeder to write to, and somebody already in the breed checking your lines before a stud inquiry or a puppy back.

Keep the set small on purpose. Whelping weeks leave nobody time for site maintenance, and a page you cannot keep current does more harm than a page you never built. The six below are the ones people actually open.

Build these first, then add a process page or a past litters page once the site is live:

Name these the way people in the breed name them, because a family who has done their reading and a stud inquiry from another breeder use the same words. Waiting list, stud fee, go-home pack, health guarantee. A visitor who cannot work out whether your list is open, or what being on it actually means, writes to ask, and that is another evening gone.

Put a figure next to the puppy price and say what it covers. Plenty of breeders leave it off and then spend the week answering "how much" one message at a time. A price on the page does that filtering for you, and it gives you one place to explain what sits behind the number: the testing on the parents, the vet work before go-home, the microchip, the registration paperwork and the food in the box. Say what costs extra as clearly, if full registration or a delivery run does.

Yola's ready-made Services and Pricing blocks lay each of these out with the name, a short line and the figure together, so a change to your stud fee is an edit you make between feeds rather than an email to somebody else.

Photographs are how somebody two states away decides whether your program is real, and puppy photos are the least useful ones you can post. Every litter is cute. What is not interchangeable is the sire and dam standing properly in good light, the room the puppies are raised in, and the same litter photographed week by week from three days old to eight.

Shoot the parents outdoors, side on, on flat ground, with the light behind you. That is the picture somebody in the breed reads, and it shows structure in a way a head shot against a sofa never will. For the whelping area, shoot it clean and honest: the pen, the floor it stands on, the door out to the yard. A family who can see where a puppy spends its first eight weeks stops asking you to describe it.

Video does more than any still for a litter, and Yola does not host video, so you shoot it on a phone, put it on the video platform you already use and embed it on the page. Thirty seconds of six-week-olds on grass with the dam in shot answers more questions than a page of writing. The stills go in Yola's ready-made Galleries block, one gallery per litter with the date in the heading, and on a paid plan you can build a custom gallery with the Custom code block if you want it laid out your own way.

Name the image files for what is in them. golden-retriever-litter-week-five.jpg and sire-hip-elbow-results-2025.jpg do far more for you in image search than IMG_2213.jpg, and repeating that wording in the alt text helps the photos surface when somebody searches the breed and a nearby city. Paid plans also come with premium stock images and 1M premium icons for the odd section that needs filling, though on a breeder's site your own dogs should be doing nearly all of the work.

Yola has no native booking, and for a breeder that is exactly the right shape. Nobody should be able to take a puppy out of a litter at eleven at night from a phone. What you want is an application, carrying enough that you can tell in two minutes whether this is a conversation worth having.

Ask for the things that let you answer properly. Who is in the household and who is home during the day, what other pets there are and what ages of children, whether there is a fenced yard or an exercise plan instead, which litter or which sex they are hoping for, whether they want a pet or are thinking about showing, and how soon they are ready. Leave a box at the end for anything else they want to tell you, because what people write in that box usually tells you more than the rest of the form. Keep the whole thing to what you will genuinely read, since every extra field costs you a submission from somebody typing on a phone, and the ones you lose are not always the ones you wanted to lose.

You choose exactly which fields appear, because Yola's contact form is customizable rather than pre-made, and the Forms block help article walks through setting one up. Yola sends an automatic confirmation the moment somebody submits, so they know it landed, and that confirmation is worth writing yourself rather than leaving as it comes. Use it to say what happens next and roughly when, or a family who has just applied writes again in three days to check you got it.

Then say plainly, right beside the button, what an application is and is not. It does not hold a puppy. It does not put anybody on the waiting list, because that only happens once you have spoken. Deposits get discussed on a call and never taken through the form. Some people will read that and close the tab, and that is the form doing its job: an application that puts off somebody who wanted a puppy by Saturday has saved you the phone call. Answer the ones that do come through inside a day or two, including the ones you turn down, because a family you say no to kindly is the family who sends you the next good one.

No license makes somebody a good breeder, and across most of the country there is no license at all for a hobby breeder with a litter or two a year. Some states license commercial kennels above a certain number of litters or adult dogs, so where your state licenses breeders, show the license number and the year it was issued. Everything else on this page is voluntary, and that is exactly why it carries weight with the people you want to hear from. Nobody made you do any of it.

Start with the parents. List every test each one has been through, with the result, the year and the registry it was recorded with, so a buyer or another breeder can look the dog up instead of taking your word. Hip and elbow evaluations, an eye examination by a veterinary ophthalmologist, and whichever DNA panel your breed calls for, whether that is PRA, degenerative myelopathy, a cardiac clearance or something particular to your lines. Where a dog has a CHIC number, give it. "Fully health tested" on its own says nothing, and the buyers who matter most to you already know that.

Then the rest of what you genuinely hold. If you belong to the national breed club or a regional one, name it and say which code of ethics you sign up to. If the litter is registered with a kennel club, say which one and when the paperwork goes home. If you are part of a kennel club breeder recognition program, name the program and the year you joined. Titles on the parents belong here too, in the ring or in a sport, because they are evidence that somebody outside your kennel has assessed the dogs. So do the plain numbers: how long you have been in this breed, and how many litters that covers.

Put your contract and your health guarantee where they can be read before anybody applies, not after. Say what the guarantee covers, for how long and what it asks of the buyer, along with your take-back clause if you have one, since that is the clause experienced buyers look for. A short version of all this goes on the home page next to the application button. The health testing page can carry the detail, but somebody who never leaves the home page should still come away knowing the parents were tested and a contract exists.

A breeder's dates page does two jobs at once. It tells a family whether waiting for you means a month or a year, and it shows anyone looking that the program is running rather than resting on one old photo. That is why it earns a page of its own instead of a line on the home page.

Expected litters go at the top, each with the sire and dam, an approximate due date and when you expect to open the list. Under that, what is on the ground now and how many are left. Then the fixed dates people plan around: go-home weekends, pickup days, and any show or specialty you will be at, because a buyer three hours away would far rather meet you and your dogs at a show than drive to your house for a first conversation. Leave the past litters up underneath. Four years of litters, each with the parents and the date, is the clearest evidence you can give that this has been going a while.

Yola has no events or calendar block, so this is an ordinary page you edit by hand, and once the first few entries are laid out, adding one means copying a line and changing four things. Nothing on the page reserves anything: somebody who wants a place goes through the application form like everybody else. The discipline is in the updating. Move a litter from expected to available the day it is born and mark it gone the day the last puppy leaves, because a stale line here brings you exactly the calls the page was built to stop.

People travel for a breeder in a way they do not for most things. Somebody will drive four hours for the right litter, so your searches are about your state as much as your town. The phrases they type are "[breed] breeder [state]", "[breed] puppies for sale near [city]" and "health tested [breed] breeder", and those belong in your page titles and headings in that wording. The map pack, those three listings with the little pins at the top, still matters for the buyers close to you. Yola's SEO Optimized Website capability handles the technical side of your pages, and the rest is your wording plus work you do on Google.

Before you tell anybody the site is live, go through it on a phone the way a family would, on the sofa in the evening. Tap the number and check it dials. Send yourself an application and read the confirmation that comes back. Open the health testing page and see whether the results are actually readable on a small screen, because that is where most people will read them.

Yola sites are mobile optimized and responsive, so the layout adapts on its own between phone and laptop, and every site gets an automatic SSL certificate and automatic backups. Check page speed on the pages doing the work, which are home, available puppies and health testing. A litter gallery with forty full-size photos in it is usually the slow one, so resize them before they go up.

After launch the upkeep follows the litters. A litter is born, so the available page changes and a gallery goes up. A puppy goes home, so the count drops. A dog finishes a title or a result comes back from the registry, so the health page gains a line. Half an hour on a Sunday keeps all of it true, and a site that keeps moving holds its search ranking better than one last touched two litters ago.

Common dog breeder website mistakes to avoid

The same handful of things go wrong on breeder sites, and each one costs you either an evening or the right home.

How much does a dog breeder website cost?

On Yola the site starts free, and a paid plan is $9.95/mo once you want your kennel name as a domain, more pages and the full AI tools. Annual plans include a free domain for the first year. Set against what the health testing on one dog costs you, the site barely registers.

Paying somebody else to build a comparable site often runs from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars, depending on how much design and photography goes into it, and changes afterwards usually carry a fee of their own.

That second number is the one that matters for a breeder, because this site is never finished. A litter arrives, a puppy goes home, a result comes back from the registry, a stud fee moves. If every one of those is an email to somebody else, you either pay each time or you stop bothering, and a site nobody updates quietly stops being true. Doing it yourself means the litter born on Tuesday is on the page on Tuesday.