Anticode Open builder

How to update opening hours on your website and every listing at once

Wrong opening hours cost you twice: a customer who turns up to a locked door, and the trust you lose with them. The fix isn't just to update opening hours on your website. It's to change every place your hours appear in one sitting, from a single list, and to handle temporary changes such as holidays differently from permanent ones.

Updated · By the Anticode team

Permanent change or temporary one?

Decide this first, because the two are handled differently everywhere.

Permanent
New regular hours from a date: winter hours, a new late night, closing on Mondays. You replace the standing hours.
Temporary
Bank holidays, a week's closure, a refit, staff training. You keep the standing hours and add a dated exception on top, then remove it afterwards.

Mixing them up is the commonest mistake: someone overwrites the regular hours with "Closed 24-26 December", forgets to change them back, and in February the site still says closed.

Make one list of every place your hours appear

Do this once and keep it. Next time the update takes ten minutes instead of a week of stragglers.

  • Your website: the hours section, the footer, the contact page, and any FAQ answer that mentions times.
  • Google Business Profile, which often matters more than the website, because it's what people see in search and maps.
  • Other map and listing services you've claimed, such as Apple's and Bing's business listings, plus booking or delivery platforms.
  • Social profiles with an hours field.
  • Offline: the sign on the door, your voicemail greeting, printed menus or leaflets, and your email signature.

Updating the website with Anticode

  1. Find every mention. Open the builder's preview and read each page, including the footer. Hours often appear in two or three places.
  2. Edit the text in place with the visual editor: click the hours, type the new ones, done. For one change in several places, a change request is quicker: "Change opening hours to Tuesday to Saturday, 9 till 5.30, closed Sunday and Monday, everywhere they appear."
  3. For a temporary change, add a notice instead. Ask for it in a sentence: "Add a notice at the top of the home page: closed 24 to 26 December, back on the 27th." Leave the regular hours alone.
  4. If hours change often, move them into a CMS collection. A collection with a day, opening and closing time and a note field can be edited in the dashboard by whoever runs the shop floor, without opening the builder.
  5. Preview on a phone, then publish. The new hours are live as soon as you publish. Recent saves stay in version history (up to your plan's number), so the old hours are a restore away if the change was premature.

Then the listings, the same day

Anticode can't update other services for you, so work down your list. In Google Business Profile, change regular hours for permanent changes, and use its separate special-hours setting for holidays so the regular hours stay intact. Search engines and map apps can take a while to show the change, so post holiday hours a week or two ahead, not the day before.

When the profiles disagree with the website, customers and search engines don't know which to believe. Consistency is the whole point of doing it in one sitting.

After a temporary change

  1. Put a reminder in your calendar for the day you reopen.
  2. On that day, remove the website notice (or restore the version from before you added it) and publish.
  3. Check Google Business Profile has dropped the special hours.
  4. Change the voicemail and door sign back.

How you know it worked

Search for your business name on your phone, outside your own Wi-Fi, and compare what search, maps and your website say. Load the site and read every page that mentions hours. If anything disagrees, it's on your list; fix it. Note the date of the change in your list so the next person knows when it was last done.

Limits

Anticode updates and publishes your own site: the hours text, a notice, or a CMS collection your staff can edit. It doesn't update Google, maps, social profiles or delivery platforms, can't schedule a notice to appear or disappear on a date, and doesn't change hours automatically for holidays. For a longer shutdown, see the temporary closure notice workflow; for the profile itself, the guide to Google Business Profile and your website. Staff who keep menus or hours current may also find letting clients update content useful.

Questions people ask

Can I schedule holiday hours to show and hide automatically?

Not in Anticode. Publish the notice when you want it to appear and remove it when you reopen; a calendar reminder helps.

Why does Google still show my old hours after I changed my website?

Google Business Profile is separate. Update the hours there yourself; search results won't take them from your site reliably.

Can staff update the hours without access to the whole design?

If the hours live in a CMS collection, they can edit those entries in the dashboard. They still need a seat in your workspace.