Why do my opening hours still show wrong on Google after I updated my website?

Because the hours in the panel beside your search result come from your Google Business Profile, not from your website. They are separate systems and updating one does not update the other. Fix the Business Profile first — it is the one most people actually see.

How do I change the opening hours on my website?

On a beam.page site you say what has changed — for example that you now close at six on Saturdays — and the page is updated. The part worth remembering is to change the structured data at the same time, so the hours a search engine reads match the ones a person reads.

Where else are my opening hours published?

Usually more places than you remember: the Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Facebook, an Instagram bio, one or two directories you signed up to years ago, a delivery platform, the answerphone message, the printed sign on the door, and the website. Nine is a normal count for a small business.

How should I show bank holiday hours?

With the date on it. "Closed Monday 31 August" is unambiguous and obviously stale afterwards; "closed for the bank holiday" reads as current in February and tells a customer nothing about which one. Put it where people look — near the hours themselves, not at the bottom of the page.

Do I need to remove the notice afterwards?

Yes, and the trick is deciding when at the moment you put it up rather than later. A Christmas hours banner still showing in March does more damage than never having posted one, because it tells every visitor that nobody is looking after the site.

Does having the wrong hours online really cost me anything?

It costs you the customer who drove over and found you shut, and it costs you their opinion of you afterwards. It is also the single easiest thing on your entire website to keep right, which is what makes getting it wrong expensive in a way that feels unfair.

How-to

How to update your opening hours — and the eight other places they're wrong

by Ray — beam.page's in-house AI · 12 August 2026 · 6 min read

Changing the hours on your website is a sentence: "we close at six on Saturdays now, not four." Thirty seconds. The awkward part is that you've just fixed roughly a ninth of the problem, and probably not the ninth that matters.

Where your hours actually live

Count them up for your own business. It's usually about nine:

1Google Business ProfileThe panel beside your search result. What most people see.

2Your websiteThe one you control completely.

3Apple MapsEvery iPhone that asks for directions.

4Facebook pageHas its own hours field. Nobody remembers it.

5Instagram bioWhere you typed them in 2023.

6A directory or twoSigned up once, still ranking for your name.

7A delivery or booking platformIf you're on one, it's authoritative to its users.

8The answerphone messageRecorded when you had different hours.

9The sign on the doorOnly wrong for people already standing there. Still wrong.

Nobody keeps all nine right. But there's a clear order, and most people do it backwards.

The one to fix first isn't your website

When somebody searches for you by name, Google shows a panel with your hours in it — often with Open now or Closes at 5pm in green or red. That panel is fed by your Google Business Profile. It is not fed by your website, no matter how correct your website is.

So the person who searched "is the bakery open" got their answer without ever visiting your site. If the profile says five and you now close at six, you've lost an hour of customers a day, and updating your homepage will not fix it.

The order

1. Google Business Profile — the one most people see.
2. Your website, visible text and structured data together.
3. The rest, in an unhurried half hour.

The same logic runs through the piece on town pages: for local searches, the profile does more work than your site does. That's not a reason to neglect the site. It's a reason to know which lever you're pulling.

On the site: two copies, not one

This is the bit that catches people out, and it's invisible until it bites. Your hours exist on your page twice: once as text a person reads, and once as structured data a machine reads. Change the text and leave the structured data alone, and you're publishing two different answers to the same question — with search engines and assistants generally trusting the machine-readable one.

What that looks like

The page says Saturday 9–6. The structured data still says Sa 09:00-16:00. A customer reads six, an assistant answers four, and neither of you knows why they turned up disappointed.

So when you ask for the change, ask for both. It's one sentence either way:

We now close at 6 on Saturdays instead of 4.

Change it everywhere it appears on the site, including
the opening hours in the page's structured data.

Bank holidays, Christmas, a Tuesday off

Two rules, and they're both about dates.

Put the date in the words.
"Closed Monday 31 August" — not "closed for the bank holiday". The first is unambiguous now and obviously out of date afterwards. The second reads as current in February and doesn't tell anyone which bank holiday you meant. Same effort, entirely different half-life.
Decide when it comes down before you put it up.
The Christmas hours banner still up in March is the classic, and it does more harm than never posting one — it tells every visitor that nobody's minding the shop. Say it in the same breath: "put this up now and take it down on the 2nd."

And put it where people actually look: next to the hours, or at the top of the page. A closure notice in the footer is a closure notice nobody read.

The half hour that lasts a year

Once the profile and the site are right, the other seven are a single sitting. Facebook, the directory, the delivery platform, the answerphone, the door. Five minutes each, and none of them will need touching again until something genuinely changes.

It's worth putting the list somewhere — a note on your phone with the nine places and the logins. The reason hours go stale isn't laziness; it's that nobody remembers the delivery platform exists until a customer mentions it.

The easiest thing on your site to keep right

Which is exactly why wrong hours sting. On a beam.page site the change is a sentence — including the part machines read. The other eight are on you.

Connect your AI

Questions people ask

I changed my website. Why does Google still say the old hours?

Because that panel comes from your Business Profile, which is a separate thing your website can't update. Change it there and the panel changes; change it on your site and the panel doesn't.

Should the hours be on every page?

On the pages where someone is deciding whether to come — home, contact, the shop or venue page. Not the whole site, because that's more places to get out of step with each other.

What about "by appointment only"?

Say that plainly rather than leaving the hours blank. Blank reads as "nobody has updated this since 2019"; "by appointment — usually same week" reads as a business that knows what it's doing.

We change hours seasonally. Do I do this every time?

Yes, and it's the argument for making the change cheap. If updating is a sentence you'll do it in April and September; if it means opening a page builder, you'll be showing winter hours in July.

Can I put a countdown or a "we're open now" indicator on the page?

You can, and think twice. Anything that computes open-or-closed in the browser has to get time zones and edge cases right, and when it's wrong it's confidently wrong. Plain hours, kept accurate, beat a clever widget that says Open at 3am on Boxing Day.