Mid-September, a Wednesday, gone five. The shutter has been up since the first, the awnings are folded away, and there are more people at the counter than there were in all of August. Someone walks in at twenty past seven, half apologising, and says they thought you closed at two. They read it on the website. You open it on your own phone, scroll to the footer, and there it is in small grey type: “Summer hours: Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 14:00.”
Or it is the banner version. A green strip across the homepage, typed in July, still announcing that you are closed for holidays from the 10th to the 31st of August and wishing everyone a good summer. The shop has been open for two weeks. The website is still away.
Nobody left it there on purpose. Someone wrote it on a Tuesday night in July so that people would not drive over to a locked door in August, and that was the right call. What never arrived was the second half of the errand, which was taking it down. By September nobody re-reads a paragraph that has been sitting there for two months, because when you open your own site you are checking that it loads, not reading the footer.
Maps is fine, and that is the trap
Most operators do have the hours right on Google. Not out of discipline: Google asks. It emails you, it puts a card in the app, it wants the local holiday confirmed and the December bank holiday too, it tells you when someone has suggested an edit. So the listing gets touched. By mid-September the card is usually close to correct.
The website asks nothing. It has been up since 2021, loading fast, good photographs, and a footer nobody has read since the last redesign. No email arrives to tell you that your summer hours expired six weeks ago. The listing gets corrected, the site stays behind, and the person looking you up reads both.
That is worse than being wrong in both places. If Maps says 9:00 to 20:00 and your site says 9:00 to 14:00, nobody thinks “the website must be out of date.” Either the doubt stays with them, or they believe the site, because the site is you and Maps is Google. And your site is almost always the last thing they read before they decide.
Where the old hours are hiding
The hours are rarely written down once. There are usually three or four copies of the same fact, entered on different days, and one of them still thinks it is July.
The footer, read the most and edited the least. The contact page, with its morning and afternoon table and its line about August being mornings only. The homepage banner that was meant to be temporary. And if you take appointments, the grid itself: slots stop at 14:00 because someone cut them there in June, so even though you now work until eight, the site will not offer Thursday at 18:00.
Then the one that costs the most and gets checked the least, which is the WhatsApp away message. Set up in August, still answering by itself at six in the evening on a Tuesday in September that you are on holiday and back on the 1st. The person writing does not know they are reading a month-old automation. They read it and believe it.
In a small hotel it is the breakfast card as a PDF with “summer season” in the header. In a restaurant, the August menu with a terrace that has already been taken in. In an optician’s, a summer-hours sticker on the inside of the glass, left over from last year, invisible now to everyone who works there. Each copy arrived on its own. They were never lined up again.
The person who had already chosen you
This does not cost you traffic. It costs you the person who had already chosen you, and that is the most expensive visitor you have.
They saw you last week, or a neighbour mentioned you, or they walked past and kept the name. Today they searched your name in Maps, not the category. They opened the site you paid for and scrolled to the footer for one specific fact: are you open now. It said 14:00. It is half past five. No call, no message. They go to the next pin, and you never learn they existed.
The other version you do hear about, and it is the one that leaves a mark. Someone turns up on a Saturday morning because the site says you open on Saturdays, and in September you do not. They drove in from the next town for nothing. That is not a missed slot any more, it is a three-star review written in the car park.
And there is a slower one that eats the whole autumn. People start ringing to ask whether you are open in the afternoon. Thirty seconds each, nobody counts them, and every one of them comes out of the same stale paragraph.
One place where the hours live
The fix is not a redesign. It is having one copy instead of four.
The hours get written in one place, and the footer, the contact page and the booking grid read from it. When they change, they change once. If that is still more than the shop can carry, the honest minimum is a written list of every place the hours appear, and one person walking the whole list on the same day: footer, contact page, homepage banner, booking grid, WhatsApp away message, Google listing.
Seasonal notices get a removal date on the day they go up. No closed-for-holidays banner without a reminder to take it down. July’s text does not delete itself, and your September does not have a spare afternoon in it for remembering.
The test, on a phone that is not yours
Ten minutes, and use the phone of whoever is on the counter rather than your own, which has the site bookmarked and the listing saved. Search the business name in Maps. Open the site. Scroll to the footer and read the hours out loud. Open the contact page and read those. If the two do not match, the test is already over.
Then message the business WhatsApp from that phone and see what answers. And if there is a bookings page, ask for Thursday at six in the evening. If it will not offer it, you are still in August.
Whose problem this is
If almost nobody opens your site and the work arrives through the listing and word of mouth, this is not your first job. Fix the hours by hand this afternoon, for nothing, and get on with the week. What follows is for a shop whose site already works: searched by name, opened from Maps several times a day, with a timetable that shifts two or three times a year between summer, Christmas and the town fair. And for a shop that can pay. A one-person business counting the month keeps the hours on a sticky note, and that is the honest answer. What follows assumes a Spanish or southern European SME already taking money and able to spend on how people come in.
Presence (€3,450) gets the listing, the site and the door saying the same hours. Bookings (€5,450) puts the hours on your own domain, with a grid that gets corrected when the season turns. Operator (€7,950) is the larger size, for a shop that already has a flow of messages to answer. Care (€149/month) is who changes the hours in September, in December and during the fair. It travels with the work, not an extra you drop to save a line on the invoice.
Web & eCommerce packages. A person writes back within 24 hours.
Frequently asked questions
Isn't it enough to have the hours right on Google?
No, because the listing is not the last thing read. People see the hours on Maps, open the site to confirm, and decide on what the footer says. When Maps and your site disagree, the site usually wins. It is yours.
Does a stale timetable really cost anything?
You do not lose traffic, you lose the person who had already chosen you, and that is the most expensive visitor you have. In the version you do hear about, someone drives over on a Saturday morning because the site says you open, and finds the shutter down.
How do I stop this happening again next summer?
Write the hours in one place that the footer, the contact page and the booking grid all read from, and give every seasonal notice a removal date on the day it goes up. If someone holds that, it does not come back. If nobody holds it, it returns in June.