Auto-update from Google My Business

@erikmolenaar I came to this post after replying to your more recent post about Special opening hours.

With Google using Structured Data to update its opening hours – this will occur whenever your website is indexed. If you can make this happen more regularly, even just the homepage, then you’ll have more current opening hours that reflect your recent edits.

If your opening hours change frequently, I recommend supplementing your regular opening hours with Special opening hours – this way you can be sure that the “Monday” you’ve mentioned matches the actual “Monday” used for that week’s opening hours. This whole plugin came about because one of my clients was changing their opening hours all the time and this really helped set them properly and consistently across their online presences.

Please feel free to post follow up questions or make suggestions for improvements.

Thank you

This whole plugin came about because one of my clients was changing their opening hours all the time and this really helped set them properly and consistently across their online presences.

My client updates opening hours the evening before or even a couple of hours prior to opening. Google MB nicely shows updated opening hours immediately. Re-indexing the homepage simply takes too long to be up-to-date.

That’s why for me a hourly/manual sync from Google MB -> WordPress would be ideal to immediately have the most up-to-date opening hours on both platforms.

Thanks for this great plugin and helping out, looking forward to the future Google MB API functionality ??

@erikmolenaar The Google My Business API does support data submissions as well… but this would be quite a significant amount of development work and I’m not sure I could provide this as a free plugin. Perhaps if there’s a demand with enough interest in a premium plugin, I could put some time aside to make this a reality.

Hi @designextreme

I conducted a little test on a high-traffic website.

6 days in advance the homepage contained valid Structured Data containing special opening hours for Pentecost: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results?id=UoF6CR6jD4_wl785zcDgzA

However, nothing was indexed by Google. Not in search results: https://www.screencast.com/t/IIQwhW50 nor at the admin console of business.google.com.

Can I hire you to troubleshoot this Structured Data and/or perhaps sponsor your plugin development to integrate syncing all openings hours from GMB -> WordPress? Please hit me at [email protected]. Thanks ??

I’ll email you shortly and discuss this further with you. I can post any helpful findings here afterwards.

Also looking for this cos custommer change every week the opening hours in GBM and ask us to change it on the website if the addon can do a check at a selected time/day to update the opening hours to sync whit GBM would be nice.

Or is it possible to add a cronjob to do a cache reset of the plugin and reload from GBM?

@dynamic22 Quite early on in the plugin’s development, I took out the functionality for synchronization. The reason was the introduction of Structured Data.

Structured Data informs Google My Business of your current opening hours – all of them, including the holidays. I recommend keeping the hours correct on your website, with Special Hours as appropriate and then GMB will reflect this in your listing there.

If I were to synchronize with GMB, then any changes here would be lost. If you did update GMB then Structured Data should be disabled. However, the Places API only supplies regular opening hours and any additional information couldn’t be included.