how do i add my opening hours to my website and keep them right

business · 2026-10-01 · 3 min

put them as text, in two places: the contact page and the footer. text is what a visitor reads, what a screen reader reads, and what google can copy into a result. a photo of the sign on the door is none of those things.

text first, never an image

the most common version is a nice graphic with the hours in a script font, uploaded as a png. it looks fine on a desktop and is unreadable on a phone. it cannot be selected, translated or read aloud, and changing one number means opening canva again.

write a short list instead: monday to friday, 9:00 to 12:30 and 15:00 to 19:00. saturday morning by appointment. closed sunday. if the lunch closing is the thing customers get wrong, say it twice: once in the list, once in a sentence.

the mechanics in the common tools

in wordpress, a paragraph or list block on the contact page, then the same block copied into the footer template in the site editor. update the footer once and it changes on every page. in wix, contact page and footer are edited separately — do not assume they talk to each other.

keep google business profile in sync, because that is where most people see your hours before they ever reach the site. two different sets of hours are worse than one slightly wrong one, because now nobody knows which to trust.

the parts people forget

holidays, the summer break, the week you close in august. a line that says "closed from 10 to 20 august, back on the 21st" is worth more than a perfect weekly table that lies for eleven days.

also: "by appointment" is an answer. "check google" is not. and if the hours genuinely change every week, say how people can confirm today — a phone number, a whatsapp link, a note at the top of the contact page.

there is a technical layer, structured data, that tells google the hours in a machine-readable way. it is useful and also a trap: add it and forget it, and you have told google something false in a format it trusts. update it with the text, or skip it.

faq

should the hours go in the footer or on the contact page?

both. the footer answers the question without a click; the contact page is where someone checks before driving over. the contact page can also carry the exceptions.

does google read the hours on my site?

it can, and it compares them with your google business profile. the profile usually wins the display, which is another reason the two must match.

what do i write for a holiday closure?

the dates and the day you reopen: "closed from 10 to 20 august, back on the 21st". a generic "closed for holidays" forces people to guess.