Are you open right now? The question that decides for you
Your opening hours are the first thing people check and the most often wrong. Where to publish them, how to keep them true, and the technical trap that hides them.
Seven in the evening, a couple in a rental car on the road into Grand Case. They are not looking for a restaurant, they already picked one. They check exactly one thing before parking, and that is whether you are open. What they read in that moment decides dinner, and you will never hear about it.
Are you open right now? Where the answer comes from
The answer your customer sees comes from your Google listing almost every time, not from your website. That listing is what shows "Open", "Closes soon" or "Closed" in the search panel and in Maps, calculated from the hours you entered there. If the listing is wrong, your website can be flawless and nobody will read it.
The practical consequence comes first: hours get fixed there, from your phone, in about five minutes. Everything else comes after. We covered the whole listing in your Google listing, the storefront customers see before your website.
So why put them on your website as well?
For three reasons that have nothing to do with Google. Your site is the only place you fully control, the only one that can explain what a table of hours cannot say, and the only one answer engines read in full.
That last point is becoming the decisive one. When somebody asks an AI which restaurants are open on a Sunday night in St Martin, or which tradesman works Saturdays, the machine can only repeat what exists as text on a page. An hour that is missing from your site is an hour nobody can quote on your behalf.
The technical trap that hides your hours
Plenty of sites show their hours through a small widget that loads after the page, often wired to an outside service. Visually it looks fine. To the crawlers behind answer engines, which read the code without running the JavaScript, that block is empty.
The rule is simple and as old as the web: hours belong in the page, as text, served on the first paint. On top of that we add the structured data markup that declares your days and times in a format Google reads without guessing. And because the outside widget is gone, the page stops waiting on a third-party server to render: our sites load in under two seconds on mobile, with PageSpeed at 90 or better. The hours are not the reason, but they benefit from it.
Hours that move with the season
That is everyone on these islands, and it is where mistakes cost the most. Dinner service only part of the year, a closing day that shifts out of season, a break between services: seven lines in a table cannot carry all of that.
What works is the table plus one sentence. The table gives the hours, readable at a glance, no zooming. The sentence underneath says what changes and when, written in English and in French. Two honest lines beat a table pretending to be true all year. For a restaurant we put that block on the homepage and on the contact page, never only in the footer, and it is one of the details we install by default on a restaurant website.
Think about one-off hours too. Your Google listing accepts specific dates, announced in advance. One closed day declared three days early is worth ten calls nobody answers.
What if you work by appointment?
Publish when you answer, not when you work. A mobile tradesman, a private chef or a therapist cannot post shop hours, but "I answer messages from 7am to 7pm, on site within 48 hours" is usable information, and it reassures far more than a silent page.
"By appointment" on its own says nothing. It leaves the visitor to guess whether they are interrupting you, and a good many decide not to find out.
Three contradictions to fix tonight
Search your name on your phone, then open your website, then your Facebook or Instagram page. You have three sources of hours and one truth. In most of the sites we audit at least two disagree, and the most visible one wins, not the most accurate one.
What gets measured
We never promise a first page on Google. Three signals tell you whether your hours are working: calls arriving outside your opening hours, reviews mentioning a locked door, and direction requests in your listing statistics. When the first two drop, your hours are correct. When the third climbs, they are being read.
Our website pricing is public, or get your quote within 24 hours.