How should I handle Ramadan and seasonal hours on my website?
The short answer
Set them in two places — your website and your Google Business Profile's special hours field — and do it two weeks ahead, not on the day. Seasonal periods are when the most people check your hours and when they are most likely to be wrong. For Ramadan specifically, say what changes rather than just listing times: iftar service, suhoor, whether the kitchen closes between them.
On this page
Why seasonal periods are the risky ones
Your regular hours are correct fifty weeks a year. The failures cluster in the few weeks when the most people are checking — and the cost of being wrong is at its highest precisely then.
During Ramadan, hours shift substantially for most food businesses and many others. Customers plan around iftar to the minute. Someone arriving at a closed door twenty minutes before sunset is not mildly inconvenienced — they have lost their meal.
The same applies to Eid, to summer schedules, and to any period where your normal pattern does not hold.
Set it in two places
Your Google Business Profile has a special hours field, separate from your regular hours. Use that field.
Do not edit your regular hours instead — that is the classic mistake, because it works during the season and then stays wrong for months afterwards when somebody forgets to change it back. Special hours revert automatically.
Your website needs it too, prominently. During the season it belongs on the homepage, not buried on a contact page.
If those two disagree, the person who checked the wrong one has a bad experience, and search engines lower confidence in both.
For Ramadan specifically, say what changes
Listing times is the minimum. What people actually want to know is how the day works:
- When you open for iftar, and whether you take bookings for it
- Whether there is a set iftar menu, and what it costs
- Whether you serve suhoor, and until when
- Whether the kitchen closes between iftar and suhoor
- Whether daytime service continues for those not fasting
- Whether delivery hours differ from dine-in
A page answering those is genuinely useful, it gets searched heavily for a few weeks each year, and almost nobody writes it. That last point is the opportunity — this is one of the least competitive high-intent moments in the calendar.
Two weeks ahead, not on the day
People plan iftar in advance. A restaurant publishing its Ramadan hours two weeks early captures the bookings; one that updates on the first day has already missed the planning window.
The same holds for Eid closures, which people check days ahead specifically to avoid a wasted journey.
The routine
Once, before each season. Ten minutes:
- Set special hours on your Google Business Profile
- Update the website, prominently
- Update delivery platforms if you use them
- Post it once on social, where your regulars will see it
- Set the reminder for the end of the season, to check it reverts
That last step is the one people skip, and it is why sites carry stale seasonal notices into June.
Why this is worth doing properly
A wrong opening time is the most damaging error a small business website can make, because the customer acts on it — they travel, and they arrive to a closed door.
During Ramadan that error costs more than at any other time of year. It is also, unusually, one of the easiest things on your website to get right: two fields, ten minutes, two weeks early.
Why this fails, structurally
Nobody sets out to leave the wrong hours up. The failure has almost always the same shape: the person who knows the hours changed is not the person who can change the website.
That gap is the entire problem. Ten minutes of work becomes an email, a wait, a reminder, and eventually a quiet decision that it is not worth chasing — so the site says 9am right through Ramadan. The Google Business Profile usually does get updated, because the owner can do that from a phone; the website does not, because they cannot.
Closing that gap is what a dashboard is for, and Helm handles this specific case deliberately: opening hours, a seasonal note and a banner for the period are fields you change yourself in a minute, in Arabic and English at once, two weeks ahead as the routine above recommends. Advice like this only works if acting on it is cheap.