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Why Google Business hours matters for a plumber
16 May 2025
How a plumber deals with Google Business hours — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: TTL of 300 seconds. The Google Business hours data is out of sync for a plumber.
We check Google Business hours for a plumber once a quarter. It takes five minutes and has caught two problems in the past year. Both would have caused downtime within a week.
WordPress can handle Google Business hours with a plugin. But the plugin adds JavaScript, a dashboard, and a support ticket when it conflicts with the next update. We wrote four lines of config instead.
When a plumber moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was TTL of 300 seconds. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
We write notes like this one because the same problems come back. If someone at a plumber reads it and avoids TTL of 300 seconds, the note paid for itself.
We have seen agencies charge a plumber for a yearly Google Business hours audit that consists of a screenshot and a paragraph. Ours is a working config file they can apply themselves.
Search consoles like honest sitemaps. Every loc should be a document. Reserving ten thousand empty shells and hoping Google does not notice is not a strategy for Google Business hours.
Automate Google Business hours if you can. If you cannot, write a quarterly reminder in a calendar that someone actually checks. TTL of 300 seconds is what happens when nobody does either.
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