Automatic sync to google?

Hello @siddler!

Yes, if your website accepts crawling by search engine robots. Structured Data when enabled will offer the perfect format for Google (and supporting search engines) to pick up your current opening hours in a precise format. This data will be used in your Google Business listing.

The frequency of the updates depends upon how often each search engine looks at your website. I recommend using the Google Webmaster Tools (or similar) to keep an eye on this.

The button to retrieve data from Google Business will do the reverse – simply download the current opening hours as listed there. I recommend performing this action during the setup to save you time, but after that, just keep your main opening hours accurate and the rest will take care of itself.

I hope this explains the synchronization between the platforms.

Hi, thank you for the fast reponse !

Ah, I thought it was the other way round. It’s our charity website, and due to the current state of the world, our hours change regularly. We currently update the facebook and google hours from our phone app (easier), and thought the website would follow automatically. Ideally, we would like to just update in one place and the facebook/google/website would sync up in time for the next day.

Is there a API/PHP call or something for the google-sync button/function that I can make a cron job to call? This would mean we only need to update facebook+google – unless you know of a way to extract hours from facebook and use those????!

Thanks

@siddler If you prefer to do it this way around, you’re better off with Structured Data disabled and manually retrieving the current hours from Google Business (i.e. press the button).

I have made the plugin fully mobile-friendly (including the Dashboard) so you can easily login through your phone and perform updates in the WordPress dashboard and this will propagate through Structured Data. I don’t think Facebook supports Structured Data though, so there’s no perfect way around your current setup.

In a pre-launch version of the plugin, I did have the synchronization automated from Google Business, but I realized that this may compound incorrect data if both this and Structured Data was enabled. I may re-add this functionality in a future version as an additional feature, but insisting that either Structured Data or Google Business synchronization is enabled but not both. I’m not looking into Facebook at this time, but I may check if this is viable as part of the development process.

Anyway for the moment, please use this information to inform yourself of the best option for you.

All the best,

Noah