Publishing seasonal and holiday hours

The profile matters more than the page

Most people never reach your website to check hours. They see a result showing open or closed, and that comes from your business profile rather than from anything you wrote on the site.

So the profile is the first thing to update, not the last. A website saying closed for the holidays alongside a profile saying open is the version that produces an angry customer.

Our page on consistent business details covers the wider problem. Hours are the detail where a disagreement costs you most immediately.

Assistants read the profile too. Somebody asking whether you are open today gets an answer built from whatever the profile says, and no part of that answer comes from your website.

Set the dates in advance

Most profiles allow special hours to be entered ahead of time, with the normal hours returning automatically afterward. That feature removes the whole problem if you use it.

Enter the whole year at once where you can. Holidays are known months ahead, and doing it in one sitting is far more reliable than remembering each time.

Put a reminder in the calendar to check anyway. Features change, entries expire, and the cost of checking is two minutes against a day of turned-away customers.

Tell your staff what the site says. The commonest version of this failure is a customer quoting your published hours to somebody who had not been told they had changed.

On the site itself

Put the changed hours where the normal hours already appear rather than in a news post nobody reads. A banner is fine as well, and it is not a substitute for updating the actual hours.

Say the dates explicitly rather than relatively. Closed from the twenty-fourth to the second is unambiguous; closed over the holidays is not, and people guess differently.

Put the hours in text rather than in an image. A graphic cannot be read by a screen reader or by an answer engine summarizing your business, and it is the commonest way hours go missing.

What to update, in order

The list below is the sequence. Doing it in this order means the sources people actually check are corrected first, and nothing depends on remembering the awkward ones.

• The business profile, with dated special hours
• The hours block on the website
• Any banner or notice on the homepage
• The contact page and any location pages
• Automatic replies on your contact routes
• Voicemail and any answering service
• A calendar reminder to reverse all of it

Say what happens while you are closed

Whether enquiries are monitored, when somebody will reply, and what to do in an emergency. A closed business that answers those three loses far fewer customers than one that simply goes quiet.

If you have an emergency route, make it prominent. Our page on emergency pages covers what that page needs, and holiday periods are when it is read most.

Where there is no cover, say so plainly with the date you return. Certainty is better than hope, and a customer who knows will usually wait.

Reversing it afterward

This is the step that gets missed. A site announcing holiday hours in March is a stronger signal of neglect than almost anything else a small business can leave live.

Use dated special hours in the profile so the reversal is automatic, and put a calendar reminder for the parts that are not.

Check the automatic replies too. An out-of-office message still running in February is the same failure in a form that most owners never see.

Recurring closures

Where you close the same weeks each year, say so as a standing fact rather than as an annual announcement. We close the first two weeks of August every year is useful information all year round.

It also prevents the enquiry that arrives in June for August work. Customers plan around a known closure and are annoyed by one they discover at the last moment.

Our page on seasonal businesses covers the wider pattern for businesses whose whole year runs on a cycle.

Put the closure in your quoting conversations as well. A customer who books work either side of a two week shutdown should hear it from you before they hear it from the page.