You’re ready to build a website for your breeding program. You Google “dog breeder website.” Every result on the first page tells you to pick a template, upload some photos, and add an about page. That advice works for a bakery. It does not work for a breeding program.

A breeder website has to do things no generic website builder was designed to handle. You need live animal inventory that updates when a puppy is sold or reserved. You need a deposit and waitlist system that doesn’t just collect an email address. You need pedigree and health testing transparency that builds trust before a buyer ever sends you a message. And you need all of it to look clean on a phone, because that’s where most of your buyers are scrolling.

This is not a “pick a template” guide. This is what a breeder website actually needs to do, written by someone who builds them, uses one to run his own breeding business, and has spent 20+ years in the animal world across ABKC, UKC, and active gecko breeding.

Why Template Builders Fall Short for Breeders

Templates are not bad. They’re just built for a different kind of business. The problems breeders run into aren’t about design. They’re about functionality that template platforms were never designed to support.

No live animal inventory. Templates treat products as static items. A puppy that’s available today, reserved tomorrow, and placed next week needs status tracking that flows through the site automatically. On a template platform you’re manually editing a page every time something changes. Miss one update and a buyer inquires about a puppy that’s already been placed. That’s a bad first impression and a waste of both your time.

No waitlist or deposit logic. A shopping cart checkout is not a deposit system. Breeders need refundable and non-refundable deposit tracking, pick-order assignments, and communication threads tied to specific litters. When a litter comes in smaller than expected and you need to renegotiate with three families on the waitlist, you need a system that keeps everything connected. No template handles this. Most breeders end up running it through Venmo and a notebook, which works until it doesn’t. I built Geckistry with a full deposit and waitlist system from scratch because this exact problem was costing me time and trust with buyers.

No pedigree or lineage at the data layer. Some platforms offer a pedigree widget that renders a tree on a page. That looks nice in a demo. But it’s display, not data. Real pedigree infrastructure means a database backing the tree, with linked health records, the ability to calculate coefficient of inbreeding, and lineage that travels with the animal when it’s placed with a new owner. A 4-generation tree graphic pasted into a page is not lineage transparency. It’s a picture.

No structured data for individual animals. When someone searches “French Bulldog puppies Tyler TX,” individual animal listings with proper schema markup can appear directly in Google results. Templates don’t generate this markup. Most themed WordPress installs don’t either. Your animals are invisible to Google unless someone builds that structure intentionally.

Monthly fees that never stop. Some breeder-specific platforms charge $30 to $80 per month, every month, for a themed website you never own. Over three years that’s $1,000 to $2,900. For a WordPress theme. A custom-built site costs a fixed price, you own the code, and there are no recurring platform fees. When you want to move hosts or change something fundamental, you can. You’re not locked in.

The template approach works if your website is a brochure. If your website needs to handle inventory, qualify buyers, manage deposits, and build trust before you ever pick up the phone, you need something built for how breeding programs actually work.

The Pages Every Breeder Website Needs

Every breeder website guide on the internet says “add a homepage, an about page, and a contact page.” That’s true and it’s useless. Here’s what each page actually needs to do.

Homepage

Your homepage has about five seconds to convince a buyer they’ve found a serious program. Lead with a clear statement of what you breed and where you’re located. One strong photo. Not a collage of thirty. Show your current availability status, even if it’s “no puppies available right now, join the waitlist.” That honesty builds trust immediately.

Put your trust signals above the fold: how long you’ve been breeding, which registries you’re affiliated with, your commitment to health testing. The CTA should lead to either your available animals or your waitlist. Not a generic “contact us” that goes nowhere specific.

Available Animals and Current Litters

This is the page that does more selling than every other page combined. Treat it accordingly.

Each animal should have its own profile with photos, date of birth, sex, color, parents linked to their own profiles, health status, price, and current availability. Status should reflect reality: Available, Reserved, Deposit Received, Placed. When a buyer sees “Reserved” next to a puppy, they know your program is active and in demand. When they see a stale page with no status updates, they wonder if the site is even maintained.

I built Texas Top Notch Frenchies with exactly this structure. Each dog has its own listing page with the information buyers actually need to make a decision. The result was a 5-star Google review and a client relationship that’s still going. You can see the full case study here.

Our Dogs and Breeding Program

Every adult in your program deserves their own page. Health testing results (OFA, PennHIP, genetic panels) should be displayed openly. Not “health tested” in a paragraph. The actual results, visible on the page. Titles and show history if applicable. Pedigree information visible, not buried behind “papers available upon request.”

When a buyer can click from a puppy’s profile to the sire’s profile and see his health clearances, titles, and lineage in one place, they don’t need to ask you for proof. The website did the work for you. That’s the difference between a site that generates qualified inquiries and one that generates tire-kickers who want you to text them photos.

Health and Testing

This deserves its own dedicated page. Not a section on the about page. Not a line in the footer. A full page explaining what health tests you run, why you run them, and what the results mean for your program.

Buyers increasingly research health testing before they ever reach out to a breeder. “OFA hips and elbows” is a search query. “Genetic panel French Bulldog” is a search query. If you have a page dedicated to this topic, you capture that traffic. If you don’t, a buyer who cares about health testing finds someone else. The ones who care about health testing are the ones you want. Software that tracks breeding records and health data at the structural level makes this page possible. Spreadsheets don’t.

Waitlist and Contact

A contact form that only collects name and email is a missed opportunity. Your form should qualify the buyer. Ask what they’re looking for in a puppy. Ask if they have a fenced yard. Ask if they’ve owned this breed before. Ask if they’re on other waitlists.

This protects you from impulse inquiries and protects buyers from getting in over their heads. It also signals professionalism. A structured intake form tells a serious buyer that you take placement seriously. A Gmail address with no form tells them you might not respond.

The Technical Decisions That Actually Matter

Most breeders don’t think about these things when they’re building a website. But these are the decisions that separate a site that performs from one that sits there looking decent and doing nothing.

Mobile-first design. Not “mobile responsive.” Mobile first. Most breeder website traffic comes from phones. Buyers scroll Instagram, see your link in bio, and tap through to your site on a 6-inch screen. If the layout breaks, the text is too small, or the photos take forever to load on cellular data, you just lost a buyer before they saw a single puppy.

Page speed. Breeders love high-resolution photos. Those photos destroy load times if they’re not optimized. A 5MB hero image that takes four seconds to load on a phone costs you visitors. Every image should be compressed and served in modern formats like WebP. Anything below the fold should lazy-load so the top of the page appears instantly.

SEO structure. Individual animal listings should have their own URLs with descriptive slugs. Your title tags should include breed, location, and what you’re offering. Schema markup on animal listings tells Google exactly what each page is about and can surface your individual dogs directly in search results by breed and location. This is engineering work that custom breeder websites include from day one. Template platforms don’t.

SSL and security. If your site doesn’t have the padlock icon in the browser bar, buyers don’t trust it. This is table stakes in 2026 but a surprising number of breeder sites still run on HTTP. Any serious build includes SSL from the start.

What Buyers Actually Look For Before They Message You

I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. I’ve sold animals through my own platform. I’ve evaluated breeders as a buyer. Here’s the evaluation process most serious buyers go through before they ever send you a message.

They check your health testing page first. If it doesn’t exist, or if it says “all our dogs are health tested” without showing actual results, they move on. Serious buyers know what OFA and PennHIP mean. They want to see the numbers, not a promise.

They look at the parents. If there are no individual profiles with photos, pedigree, and health clearances, they question the program’s legitimacy. It might be unfair, but that’s how it works. A sire page with one blurry photo and no lineage information raises more questions than it answers.

They look for social proof. Testimonials from previous buyers. Google reviews. Social media presence linked from the site. If your site has no evidence that other people have bought from you and had a good experience, the buyer carries all the risk.

They check how recently the site has been updated. A “Spring 2024 Litter” announcement still on the homepage in 2026 signals an abandoned or neglected site. Even if your program is thriving, an outdated website makes it look like it isn’t.

They check the contact process. A branded email with a structured inquiry form feels professional. A Gmail address with no form feels like they’re sending a message into the void and hoping someone responds. The contact experience is part of the trust evaluation, whether you think about it that way or not.

None of this is theoretical. It comes from actually being in the community. And it’s the lens I use when I build breeder websites for clients. Every decision in the build is shaped by what I know the buyer is looking for before they pick up the phone.

Build or Buy? When a Custom Site Makes Sense

I’m going to be honest here, because breeders respect straight talk more than a sales pitch.

A template works if you have fewer than five adults in your program, you produce one or two litters a year, your website is genuinely just a brochure, and you’re comfortable maintaining it yourself. There’s nothing wrong with that. A clean Squarespace site with good photos and basic information is better than no site at all. If that’s where you are right now, start there.

A custom build makes sense if you have a waitlist system you want to automate, you want live inventory that updates without manually editing a page, you want pedigree and health data displayed structurally instead of typed into a text field, you want SEO that brings buyers to you instead of just showing your site to people who already know your name, or you want an integrated platform where your website, your records, and your sales system all talk to each other.

The breeders who start on templates often come back for custom builds 12 to 18 months later, once their program outgrows what the template can handle. That’s a perfectly fine path. The important thing is that your website works for the stage you’re in right now and doesn’t actively lose you sales.

What I Build and Why

I run Built By Dusty, a software studio that builds custom breeder websites, breeding records apps, and sales platforms for animal breeders. I built Geckistry to run my own crested gecko breeding business because no e-commerce platform could handle live animal sales with genetics data. I built ReptiDex because no records app on the market gave breeders the depth they actually need. It hit 50 paid subscribers in its first 9 days.

I grew up in dogs. My family bred and showed ADBA American Pit Bull Terriers, then moved into American Bullies around 2005 when the breed was still being formed. I was part of the group that helped establish early ABKC infrastructure. I’ve made group placements in UKC. I breed crested geckos today. When I build a breeder website, I’m not guessing at what the buyer wants to see or how the waitlist should work. I’ve lived it.

The Texas Top Notch Frenchies site earned a 5-star Google review. Geckistry processes real transactions for real animals. ReptiDex tracks real pedigrees for real breeders. You can read the full build stories in the case studies.

If you’re ready to build a site that works as hard as your program does, I’d like to hear what you’re working on.