Ask any restaurant what their website is for and “so people can check we’re open” is near the top. Yet opening hours are the single thing most likely to be wrong — because they live as text someone has to remember to edit every time a bank holiday, a private event or a seasonal change comes along.
There are four common ways to put hours on a site. They are not equally good.
1. Typed straight into the page
The default: the hours sit in a paragraph or footer, typed by whoever built the site. It works on day one and rots from there. Every change means editing the website — logging into the CMS, or emailing the agency — and the bank-holiday Monday is exactly when nobody remembers to.
- Pro: zero setup.
- Con: silently goes stale; no live open/closed status; every change is a website edit.
2. A static hours table
A neater version of the same thing — a styled table or a CMS block. It looks tidier but has the same flaw: it’s a snapshot. There’s no concept of “open now,” no handling of a one-off closure, and updating it is still a manual website edit.
3. Pulling hours from Google
Some sites embed a Google Map, which shows your Google Business Profile hours. That keeps one source of truth — but only if you maintain Google perfectly, the embed is small and map-shaped, and you’re happy handing the look of your own site to Google’s widget. It also does nothing for the rest of your pages.
4. A live opening hours widget
The version built for this problem: a widget on your site that reads from a dashboard. You set your regular hours once, add overrides for bank holidays, seasonal changes and one-off closures, and the widget shows a live open-or-closed status derived from the actual time. Change anything in the dashboard and new page views update within a minute — no CMS login, no agency email.
- Live open/closed status, not just a list.
- Bank-holiday and one-off overrides that apply and revert on their own.
- Kitchen hours separate from bar hours; late services that cross midnight handled correctly.
- One change updates every page the widget appears on.
If your hours change more than once a year — and for a restaurant, bar or pub they do — a live widget is the only option that doesn’t depend on someone remembering to edit the website.
Which should you use?
If your hours genuinely never change, typed text is fine. For an actual hospitality venue, a live widget is the one that stays honest without becoming a chore. Foldout’s opening hours widget does exactly this — one managed schedule, published to every installed widget.