Hours and contact details that win customers

It's ten to six and someone's in a parking lot with their phone out, deciding whether it's worth driving over. They're not on your homepage — they're reading whatever the search results say about your hours. If that says six and you locked up at half past five, you just made an enemy for free.

Hours and contact details are what people came for. Most sites treat them as filler at the bottom of the page.

The hours people read aren't the ones on your website

Your opening hours live in at least two places: your own site, and your business listing in the search results. Plenty of customers never get past the second one — they see the hours and the number, they call or they drive over. Your homepage never enters the picture.

An out-of-date listing beats a beautiful website every time. Keep the two in agreement — someone who finds different answers assumes both are wrong.

Same for profiles you've forgotten — a directory you signed up for years ago, a social page you stopped posting to. Search your own business name and see what comes back; getting found in your own town goes further into that.

Write the hours you actually keep

List the real ones, not the tidy-looking version. A café that doesn't open until 10 on Sundays should say 10, not "open daily from 8" because it reads better.

Things almost everyone forgets:

• The lunch break. "Mon–Fri, 8 to 6" is a lie if you lock the door from 12 to 1. Someone will drive over, find it locked, and remember.
• Vacations and holidays. Closed for two weeks in the summer? Put it up before you go, not from the beach.
• Hours aren't the same as availability. Plenty of trades have no storefront to open — they have phone hours. So write that: "You can reach us by phone Mon–Fri, 7 to 9am and after 5pm." That's more useful than inventing opening hours you don't keep.

Put them on the page as plain text — not a photo of the sign on your door, not a PDF, not a graphic. People should read it without pinching to zoom.

Make the number tappable

Somebody locked out of their own apartment at ten at night won't scroll past your company history to find a number. They'll hit the back button and call the next result.

So the number goes near the top of the homepage, visible without scrolling. Not tucked behind a "Contact" menu item. And it has to be real text, not baked into an image — otherwise nobody can copy it and search engines can't read it.

More to the point, make it tappable: a link like tel:+15551234567 sitting behind the number, in international format with the country code. If someone built your site for you, send them that line — they'll know what to do with it. Same for your email address, using mailto:.

Then test it on your own phone. Nothing happens when you tap? That's tonight's job. What actually matters on a phone covers the rest of what breaks on a small screen.

What a caller hears when nobody picks up

A physio practice with two treatment rooms can't answer the phone at two in the afternoon. Everybody understands that. What nobody forgives is a phone that rings out into nothing.

Record a voicemail that says who you are and when you'll call back — "You've reached Ridgeway Physio, we're with patients until five and we'll return your call this evening" — then actually do it. Someone who knows a callback is coming stops shopping around. Someone who counts twelve rings calls the next name.

A form is not a contact page

A form is fine as an extra. As the only option, it's bad. Some people would rather write from their own inbox. Some just want to know where you are, so they can work out whether you cover their street.

Give them all of it:

1. A phone number
2. An email address written out as text, not hidden behind a form
3. Where you're based — even with no storefront and a van instead. In that case: "Based in Milltown, covering about 20 miles around."
4. How fast you reply, if you can say it honestly: "We usually get back to you the same business day."

That last one does a lot of quiet work: it tells someone their message isn't going into a void, and stops them calling three competitors while they wait. It also has to be true — if you only open that inbox on Fridays, say so or promise nothing. If the rest of your site reads stiff, writing copy that convinces people is about loosening it up.

Twenty minutes, tonight

Work down this list:

• Open your site on your phone. Can you see where you're based without scrolling to the bottom?
• Compare the hours on your site with the hours on your listing. Do they match, exactly?
• Add the lunch break, the vacation, the holidays. Now, not later.
• Call your own number and listen to what a stranger hears.
• Send a test message to your own contact address. Does it arrive? Does it land in spam? Is anyone reading that inbox?

The last two sound silly and catch people out constantly. A contact address nobody has opened in months is worse than none at all: the customer thinks they've reached you, then never hears back.

If your site doesn't handle the basics, Foliovo builds simple sites where this sits right from the start. You don't need us for any of it, though — every item above you can fix yourself tonight.