Your opening hours are wrong somewhere. Here's where to look.

Someone looked you up, got in the car, drove over, and found the door locked.

They don’t ring to complain. They go somewhere else, and a small percentage of them leave a review saying you were shut when your website said otherwise — and that review will still be there in three years, long after the Tuesday afternoon it describes.

It is a small, unglamorous, entirely avoidable problem, and almost every business we look at has some version of it.

Your hours live in more places than you think

Write down where a customer could find your opening times. For most small firms the honest list runs to something like:

Your website. Your Google Business Profile. Apple Maps. Bing Places. Your Facebook page. Your Instagram bio. A booking system. Two or three directories you signed up to years ago and have never logged into since. Possibly the recorded message on the phone. Possibly a laminated sign on the door that has outlived two price rises.

Nobody sat down and decided to publish their opening hours in nine places. It accumulated. And each one was last edited by a different person, at a different time, for a different reason — which is precisely why they now disagree with one another.

The one you fixed probably isn’t the one they read

Here is the bit that catches people out.

When somebody searches for a local business on a phone, the times they see next to the map and the phone number generally come from your Google Business Profile — not from your website. Your site may be immaculate. If the profile says otherwise, the profile is what most people will act on, because it is right there and they never clicked through.

So the first job is not “update the website”. It is: search for your own business on your phone, as a stranger would, and read what it says.

Regular hours are easy. It’s the exceptions that get you.

Most businesses have their normal weekly hours roughly right. What goes wrong is the days that differ — the bank holiday, the stocktake, the week in February you shut, the Christmas period.

Those are the days with the highest chance of a wasted journey, because they are exactly the days people check first and assume the worst about second.

Google has a specific feature for this and it is under-used. In your Business Profile: Edit profile → Hours → the pencil icon next to “Special hours”. Add the date, either untick “Closed” and put in the times or tick “Closed”, and save. It overrides your normal hours for those dates only, and your weekly schedule is left alone.

Two things worth knowing, both from Google’s own documentation. Special hours will only display if your hours are set to “Open with main hours”. And a special-hours entry covers up to six consecutive days — if you are shutting for longer than that, you are meant to mark the business temporarily closed instead.

The August bank holiday falls on Monday 31 August this year in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Scotland’s summer one was the first Monday, so that ship has sailed.) That is a little over three weeks away, which is a good deal more warning than most people give themselves.

Doing it once, properly

Make the list. Every place your hours appear. It will be longer than you expect and that is the point — you cannot maintain a list you have never written down.

Give it one owner. Not “we all keep an eye on it”. One name. Shared responsibility for a dull task is the same as no responsibility for it.

Put the bank holidays in a calendar now, with a reminder a fortnight before. All of next year’s, in one sitting. Ten minutes, once, and the problem stops recurring.

Delete what you can. Some of those directory listings do nothing for you and are simply another place to be wrong. If a listing brings you no enquiries, removing it is a legitimate fix.

Why the website one goes stale specifically

Worth being honest about the mechanism, because it isn’t laziness.

Changing your Google hours takes ninety seconds on a phone. Changing a line on a lot of small-business websites means emailing whoever built it, explaining what you want, and waiting — possibly for a small invoice. So it gets postponed, and postponed, and eventually it is a year out of date and nobody can remember why.

That is a friction problem, not a diligence problem, and it is the same one behind almost every stale website we see. It is why we built beam.page around being able to change your own site in plain English — a page you can edit in a minute is a page that stays true, and not having to book a developer for a sentence turns out to matter more than any amount of good intention.

What argues against bothering

If nobody ever comes to your premises — you are a consultancy, a trade that works on site, an online shop — then most of this is noise. Get the Google profile right, ignore the rest, and go and do something that earns money.

And it is fair to say this is housekeeping, not strategy. Nobody grew a business by having correct opening hours. But plenty of people have quietly lost customers by not, and the fix costs you one evening, once.

The short version

Search for yourself on your phone right now, the way a customer would. Whatever it says is what your business currently claims. If that is wrong, it has been wrong for a while.

Source: the instructions for setting special hours, the “Open with main hours” prerequisite and the six-consecutive-day limit are taken from Google Business Profile Help, “How to set Special hours”, checked directly. UK bank holiday dates for England, Wales and Northern Ireland are published on gov.uk.