Menus, events, stock and opening hours

A café's specials change by the day. A venue adds new dates every week. When the same details live in three places, one of them falls behind.

The fix is a habit more than a tool. For each kind of information, the team picks one place where it gets changed first, and everywhere else follows that copy.

Opening hours

Keep the weekly pattern on one page of your site and in your Google Business Profile, and change both at the same sitting.

Google's help pages describe special hours for short changes. A business can set them when it temporarily adjusts its hours of operation or remains closed for up to 6 days in a row, and its regular hours stay as they were. Google also suggests confirming hours for official holidays, even when they match the usual ones.

A site can tell Google its hours directly too. Google's local business guidance explains how a web developer marks up business hours on a page.

Events

A venue may already list its events on a ticketing site. Google says that if your event publisher is already integrated with its event search, you can continue to post your events on the third-party website. In that case the ticketing site is the true copy, and your own pages link to it.

Events listed on your own site can be marked up for Google instead. The same guidance shows how to mark an event as cancelled or rescheduled.

Menus

Keep the current menu as one document. The website, the printed copy and any delivery app all take their wording from it.

Dishes with allergens carry a duty, covered in the last section below.

Stock and products

For a shop, the true copy can be the shop system itself. Shopify, for example, lets a store export its products to a spreadsheet file. It suggests this for a backup, for moving products to another Shopify store, or for editing many products at once.

Allergen information for food ordered online

When customers order food online or by phone, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) says allergen information must be provided at two stages. The first is before the purchase is completed, in writing (on a website, catalogue or menu) or by phone. The second is when the food is delivered, in writing (for example allergen stickers or an enclosed menu) or by phone.

The FSA advises written allergen information at both points, when the order is placed and when it arrives. For loose food, it says allergen information is required for each item containing one of the 14 allergens. A new dish on the menu needs its allergen line on the site the same day.

Useful links