Seasonal Business Website: What to Do When You Close for Winter

This is the last weekend of September, and all along the coast the shutters are coming down. A prospect asked me on a call this morning whether she should switch her website off until March to save a few quid, and it is not the first time this month I have heard it.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is worth ten minutes of your time, because the decision you make about your website this week decides how quickly you get found when you reopen.

Switching it off costs more than it saves

The instinct makes sense. The business is closed, nobody is booking, so why pay for a website nobody is using? Cancel the hosting, let the domain sit there, put it all back in the spring.

Google has published guidance on exactly this situation, and it is blunt. Its Search Central documentation on pausing an online business says that if the closure is temporary and you plan to reopen, the recommendation is to "keep your site online and limit the functionality" ^[1]. Taking the whole site down is the option Google explicitly advises against.

Why? Because a site that vanishes gets dropped from the index. Google warns that removing a site completely "can take quite some time to recover from", and adds that "there's no fixed time for a recovery from a complete removal, and there's no mechanism to speed that up" ^[1]. Even the polite technical route, a temporary "service unavailable" signal, is only meant for a day or two.

What March looks like after a dark winter

Think through the spring that follows. Consider a typical case: a Mayo sea-kayak hire business on Clew Bay switches its site off in October to save the hosting fee. It reopens in March. The website goes back on. Then the waiting starts. Weeks go by while Google slowly recrawls pages it used to know well, and in the meantime anyone searching for a place to stay, a boat trip, or a surf lesson over Easter finds whoever left their site running all winter. The Easter bookings are gone before you even know they were there to be had.

That is the real cost. Not the hosting fee. The first month of the new season.

Your customers are not closed for the winter

Something the "switch it off" plan misses: Your season ends. Your customers' interest does not.

The CSO's Household Travel Survey shows Irish residents took about 15.3 million domestic overnight trips in 2025. Roughly 2.8 million of those fell in the first quarter and around 3.5 million in the fourth ^[2][3]. So somewhere around four in every ten domestic trips happened in the months most seasonal businesses think of as dead. That figure mixes city breaks and family visits with coastal holidays, so your own share will vary a lot by sector. But the people who travel in winter are the same people who plan summer in winter.

And winter brings its own trade:

• Christmas gifts. A voucher for a surf lesson, a night's glamping, or a cookery class is an easy present to buy, but only if someone can find the page and pay for it. Selling vouchers through your own website rather than a third-party platform keeps the margin with you.
• Advance bookings. Families lock in summer dates early, especially for group trips and weddings.
• Enquiries. Corporate groups, schools and clubs plan months out and email whoever looks organised.

A switched-off site cannot take any of that. A switched-on site with a clear off-season message takes all of it.

What the off-season homepage should actually say

Keeping the site online is step one. Making it useful while you are closed is step two, and this is where most seasonal operators fall short.

A good off-season site does three things. It tells visitors plainly that you are closed and when you reopen. It tells them what they can still do right now. And it keeps every page Google already knows about exactly where it is.

Say when you reopen, in plain words

Put a short banner at the top of the homepage: "Closed for the season. We reopen on Saturday 13 March 2027. Bookings for next season are open now." Give an actual date, even a provisional one. "Back in the spring" reads like a business that might not be back at all.

Keep your pages, change their content

Resist the urge to delete your summer pages or your price list. Those URLs have built up whatever standing they have with Google over months or years. Deleting them throws that away. Update them instead. Change this year's prices to next year's (or add a line saying next year's prices will be confirmed by a set date) and leave the page where it is.

Turn off what cannot work, not the whole site

If you take online bookings or sell online, switch off only the parts that would let someone buy something you cannot deliver. Block out closed dates in your booking calendar. Pause products that only exist in summer. Leave vouchers, enquiry forms and future-date bookings working. Google's own advice follows the same logic: limit functionality, do not remove the site ^[1].

Google Business Profile: the temporarily closed trade-off

Your website and your Google listing need to tell the same story. If one says "open" and the other says "closed", customers trust neither.

Google's guidance for seasonal businesses is clear. During the off-season "you can mark your business as temporarily closed", and when you reopen you set your regular hours again ^[4]. Its help page on closures says to use "Temporarily closed" if you are shut for more than seven days or for the off-season ^[5]. Your listing then shows a closed label, which is honest, and it stops people driving out to a locked gate.

The ranking cost nobody mentions

Now the part most guides skip. The same Google help page admits that "for broad queries, temporarily-closed businesses can rank after open businesses" ^[5]. So marking yourself closed is the right call for your listing, but it will cost you some visibility on generic searches ("things to do near me", "glamping in the west") for as long as it is set.

That is a genuine limitation, and it cannot be worked around from inside your Business Profile. What you can control is everything that does not depend on the listing: your website ranking for searches about your business type and area, your vouchers, your advance booking page. That is exactly why the website has to stay on while the listing says closed. The listing tells people you are shut. The website tells them what to do about it.

Put a reminder in your diary for the week before you reopen. Forgetting to flip the listing back to open is one of the most common spring mistakes I hear about, and it quietly suppresses you through the busiest booking weeks.

Take next season's bookings while you are closed

The quiet months are when many seasonal operators get their best-margin bookings of the year: early, confirmed, often with a deposit paid. The catch is that they arrive on whichever website makes it easiest.

If your bookings currently go through a third-party platform, winter is a good time to look at taking some of them directly on your own website. A direct booking made in January for a July visit carries no commission, and the customer's details are yours to keep for next year.

I once told a seasonal accommodation owner not to bother with direct bookings until they had a "proper" website redone the following spring. That was bad advice. They missed a whole winter of early enquiries waiting for a perfect site when the one they had would have done the job. I would not make that call again.

Use the quiet months to rebuild, not to rest the site

Winter is the one time of year a seasonal owner has hours to spare. That makes it the right time to rework the website, provided you do it without breaking the one that is taking vouchers and bookings.

Rework it where customers cannot see

Web60 includes one-click staging environments. In plain terms, you get a private copy of your site where you can rewrite pages, add next year's activities, change photos and try a new layout while the production site keeps selling vouchers untouched. When you are happy, you push the changes across. Without staging, the alternative is editing the live site in the middle of the Christmas voucher rush and discovering the checkout is broken when a customer emails to ask why their payment will not go through.

Keep a safety net under every change

Winter rebuilds go wrong in small ways: a deleted page, an overwritten price list, a plugin that does not agree with another one. Web60 takes automatic nightly backups with one-click restore, and snapshots before updates and restores. In practice, the worst case of a bad afternoon's editing is losing that afternoon, not your whole site and everything you wrote over the summer.

Read what people looked for while you were closed

Web60's built-in, privacy-first analytics works without a cookie consent banner for analytics tracking. It shows which pages people visited over the winter. If your voucher page got steady visits in December and your summer camp page started climbing in February, that tells you where to put your effort and when to open bookings next year. You should still mention the analytics in your privacy policy for full transparency, but you are not asking every visitor to click through a banner first.

Why the cost question usually disappears

Nearly every time someone asks me about switching off for winter, the real question is money. It is hard to justify a monthly hosting bill for a business that has no revenue coming in until spring.

That concern is fair when the website is expensive to keep. An agency-built site typically comes with €500 to €2,500 a year in ongoing hosting and maintenance, plus €75 to €150 an hour whenever something needs changing. Owners paying that over a winter with no income understandably start looking for things to cut.

The maths looks very different at €60 a year with everything included: hosting, SSL, backups, security, analytics and support. Spread across twelve months, that is €5 a month. Keeping a site running through five closed months costs about €25, less than a single dinner out, and it keeps your standing with Google, your voucher sales and your early bookings going the whole time. Since Web60 is built on WordPress, which W3Techs puts at around 40% of all websites on the internet ^[6], you are also not locked into a closed system if you ever want to take the site somewhere else.

When a full website is not worth it

To be fair to the other side, there is one case where a full website may not earn its keep. If you run a single summer stall at a market, take no bookings, sell nothing ahead of time and all your trade comes from people walking past, a well-kept Google Business Profile and a social page may genuinely be enough. Likewise, if every single booking you take comes through Booking.com and you have no interest in direct bookings, a website is doing less for you. But most seasonal operators sell vouchers, take deposits, or want repeat customers without paying commission, and for all of them the site pays for itself.

Closing up for winter in five steps

This is the process I would walk any seasonal owner through before the last guest leaves.

1. Deploy an off-season banner. Add a short message to the top of the homepage with your reopening date and what customers can still do now.
2. Verify your booking and shop settings. Block out closed dates, pause summer-only products, and leave vouchers and future bookings switched on.
3. Update, do not delete. Change prices and dates on existing pages to next season's details rather than removing those pages.
4. Sync your Google listing. Mark your Business Profile as temporarily closed and put a diary reminder in for the week before you reopen.
5. Stage next season's changes. Make your rebuild in a staging environment over the winter and push it to production when it is ready.

Closed for the season, open for business

A seasonal business is not a business that disappears for half the year. It is a business with a quiet half and a busy half, and the website is one of the few parts of it that can keep working in both.

Keep it on. Tell people plainly when you reopen. Let them buy vouchers and book ahead while you are closed, and use the quiet months to make the site better for spring. If you are starting from scratch or your current site is more trouble than it is worth, you can build a fresh one yourself in about a minute and have the winter to get it just right.

The shutters can come down this weekend. Your website does not need to follow them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I take my website down when my seasonal business closes?

No. Google recommends keeping a temporarily closed business's website online and limiting what it does, rather than removing it. A site that goes offline for months can drop out of Google's index, and Google says there is no set recovery time and no way to speed it up. Keep the site live with a clear message about when you reopen.

Will marking my business temporarily closed on Google hurt my ranking?

It can, for broad searches. Google's own help page says temporarily closed businesses can rank after open ones for broad queries, depending on the category and how many similar businesses are closed. It is still the honest setting for your listing during the off-season, which is why your website needs to stay on and keep ranking in its own right.

How long can a website be in maintenance mode before Google drops it?

Google's guidance treats a temporary "service unavailable" response as suitable for a day or two, not for weeks. For an off-season closure lasting months, keep your normal pages online and add a closure banner instead of putting the whole site behind a maintenance screen.

Can I still sell gift vouchers while my business is closed?

Yes, and for many seasonal businesses the run-up to Christmas is one of the best times to do it. Keep your voucher page working, state clearly the dates vouchers can be redeemed, and make sure any expiry terms are shown on the page before purchase.

What should my website say during the off-season?

State that you are closed for the season, give a specific reopening date, and list what customers can do now: buy a voucher, book for next season, or send an enquiry. Keep the rest of your pages in place and update prices and dates for next year rather than deleting them.

Is it worth paying for hosting when my business is closed for half the year?

That depends on what the hosting costs. At €60 a year all-inclusive, keeping the site running through the winter costs roughly €5 a month and protects your Google visibility, voucher sales and early bookings. If your current setup costs hundreds a year, that is a reason to look at a cheaper platform, not to switch the site off.

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