Opening Hours Nobody Updated

Why this field matters more than the others

Most of a listing is read casually. Hours are read with intent, by somebody deciding whether to set off.

Get them wrong and the cost is not a missed impression. It is a person standing outside a locked door, having spent half an hour getting there.

That person does two things: they go to a competitor, and they occasionally write about it. A one-star review saying the hours were wrong is difficult to answer, because they were.

A worked example

A specialist food shop that had stopped opening on Mondays about eighteen months earlier.

The listing still showed Monday hours because nobody had thought to change it. The website said the correct thing, which the owner assumed was enough.

Over a year that produced a steady trickle of people arriving on Mondays. Most simply left. Three wrote reviews, all mentioning the same thing, which meant anybody reading the listing saw a pattern rather than an incident.

The fix was one field and took a minute. The three reviews stayed for years.

The instructive part is that the business had done nothing careless. It had updated the source it controlled and forgotten the one customers actually check.

Where the wrong hours live

• The listing, which is what most people see first.
• The website footer, frequently hard-coded years ago.
• The contact page, which sometimes disagrees with the footer.
• Social profiles, which have their own hours field.
• Directory entries, carrying whatever was submitted originally.
• The voicemail greeting, which nobody thinks of as hours and is.

Six places, updated by different people at different times. The footer is the sneakiest, because it appears on every page and is edited by nobody.

Holiday hours are a separate thing

The setting almost nobody uses, and the one that causes the most trouble.

Listings support special hours for specific dates. Set them and the listing shows the correct thing on that day, sometimes with a note that hours may differ.

Leave them and the listing confidently shows your normal Monday hours on a statutory holiday, which is precisely when somebody is checking before driving out.

The dates worth setting in advance for a Canadian business: New Year's Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, the August holiday, Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, and the Christmas period.

Setting a year of them takes about fifteen minutes once and prevents ten separate incidents.

The counter-case

Where being precise is worse than being approximate.

A mobile trade with no premises should not publish hours implying somebody is at a counter. If the listing has no address, hours describe when you answer the phone, and that is a different promise.

Some businesses are better served by no hours at all than by hours they cannot keep. A one-person trade who is on site all day and returns calls in the evening is more honest with a stated response time than with nine to five.

And a business whose hours genuinely vary week to week should not publish a fixed schedule it will breach. Saying by appointment is accurate and does not generate wasted journeys.

Seasonal changes

The version that catches trades rather than shops.

Businesses with a busy season frequently extend hours for a few months and never change the listing back, or change it forward and forget the reversion.

The pattern to adopt: whenever hours change for a season, set a calendar reminder for the date they change back, at the same moment. Otherwise the reversion depends on somebody noticing, and nobody does.

Temporary closures

A separate setting again, and the right tool for a genuine gap.

Closing for two weeks in summer, or for renovation, is better handled by marking the listing temporarily closed than by leaving normal hours or deleting the listing.

Deleting is the mistake worth avoiding. A removed listing loses its history and its reviews, and recreating it is starting over.

Temporarily closed is visible, honest, and reversible in one click. It also stops the listing accumulating reviews from people who arrived during the closure.

What customers do with the information

Worth understanding because it explains the weight.

Somebody checking your hours has already decided they want what you sell. They are the furthest along of any visitor.

Losing them is not losing an impression at the top of a funnel. It is losing a customer at the bottom of one, over a detail that cost nothing to get right.

Which is why this small administrative field is worth more attention than most of what a business does in a month of marketing.

Who notices first

Not you, which is the structural problem.

A business owner never checks their own hours, because they know them. The people who check are strangers, and the ones who find them wrong mostly say nothing and go elsewhere.

Which means the feedback loop is broken. A wrong address produces a phone call asking for directions. A wrong phone number produces silence. Wrong hours produce silence too, punctuated occasionally by a review.

So this is a field that has to be checked deliberately rather than trusted to surface. Nothing will tell you, and the one thing that eventually does is the thing you were trying to avoid.

The ten minute routine

1. Check the listing hours against what you actually do.
2. Check the website footer and contact page.
3. Check the social profiles.
4. Listen to your own voicemail greeting.
5. Set the next twelve months of holiday hours.
6. Diarise a check for the next seasonal change.

The fourth is skipped universally and is frequently wrong by years, still referring to a Christmas closure from a previous decade. It costs nothing to re-record and somebody hears it every day.

The habit that keeps it right

Whenever hours change, change them everywhere in the same sitting.

Not later, not when there is time. In the same ten minutes, working from the list above, because the alternative is one source being right and five being wrong for the next two years.

Keep the list somewhere rather than in your head, because the person changing the hours in three years may not be you, and six places is more than anybody remembers.

The wider version of that consistency problem is covered in your address in three places, written three ways.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.