Hurricane season and your website: a 30-minute plan.

It's September. If you run a business in Jacksonville or Orange Park, you already know what that means: we're in the loud part of hurricane season, and it doesn't officially end until November 30.

Here's the thing almost nobody has ready.

When a storm gets named and the tracks start pointing at Northeast Florida, your customers do not call you. They look you up. They type your name into a phone, glance at whatever Google shows them, and decide in a few seconds whether you're open, closed, or worth a phone call.

And what they usually find is a website that says nothing at all and a Google listing with your regular Tuesday hours on it.

That's not a marketing failure. That's what happens when the week gets away from you — you're moving equipment, you're boarding up, you're deciding whether the family stays or drives to Georgia. The website is item forty on a list of twelve things.

Which is exactly why you do the work now, in the boring week, so that during the bad week it takes ten minutes.

Do the setup in September, not during the cone

The mistake is treating this like something you'll handle when a storm shows up. You won't. Nobody does. The window where you'd need to announce a closure is the same window where you have the least time and possibly no power.

So the goal isn't a storm plan. It's a storm switch — a few things already built, already written, already logged into, so flipping them on is a two-minute job from your phone in a parking lot.

1. Build the banner before you need it

You want one line of text that can appear at the very top of every page on your site: "Closed Thursday and Friday for Hurricane [Name]. Reopening Monday — call (555) 555-5555 for emergencies."

Simple, ugly, unmissable. Not a popup. Not a modal that people have to close. A colored strip above your logo.

The part that matters: that banner should already exist in your site's code, sitting there switched off, with the text written and the styling done. Turning it on should mean changing one word or unchecking one box — not writing HTML on your phone during a power outage.

On WordPress that's a plugin or a theme setting, twenty minutes. On a hand-built site, ask whoever built it to add a commented-out banner block and tell you which two lines to change. If nobody's touching your site anymore, this is the best argument I know for a care plan — not because banners are hard, but because you don't want to be hunting for a web person on a Wednesday night in September.

2. Your Google Business Profile is the real front page

I'd argue this one matters more than your website during a storm week, and it's the one that's almost always wrong.

Most people searching "is [your business] open" never reach your site. They see the Google panel — hours, phone, that little green "Open" or red "Closed." That panel is what decides whether they call.

Three things to know:

• Use Special Hours, not "Temporarily Closed." Special Hours let you set specific dates as closed and everything reverts on its own afterward. The "temporarily closed" flag is a different, blunter setting, and it's easy to forget to switch it back for weeks. Special Hours cleans up after you. That's worth a lot when you're exhausted.
• Post an update. A Google Post shows up on your profile and takes about ninety seconds. "Closed Thursday–Friday, reopening Monday" — that's the whole thing.
• Know your login now. Today. Go confirm you can actually get into your profile. A lot of owners can't — it's tied to an email nobody uses or a former employee's account. That's a two-week problem to fix, and you can't fix it during a storm.

If you've never audited that listing, it's probably wrong in other ways too.

3. Know where your website actually lives

This is the unglamorous one and it's the one that bites hardest.

Write down, in a place you can reach from your phone: who hosts your site, who your domain is registered with, and how to log into both. If you have a web person, add their cell number.

Then the follow-up question, which is the one people get wrong: is your domain set to auto-renew, and is the card on file still good? Domains expire on a date, not a mood, and they don't care that it's storm week. A site that goes dark because a card expired in 2024 looks exactly like a business that closed permanently.

Five minutes. Do it while you're thinking about it.

4. Make sure your phone number is actually reachable

During a storm week, your website's job shrinks down to one thing: connect a worried person to a human being.

Check that your number is a real tap-to-call link on mobile, not a picture or plain text. Check it's visible without scrolling. Check that the number on your site, on Google, and on Facebook match. Mismatches are common: a cell on one and a dead landline on another.

And if your contact form is the only way to reach you, that's a problem on a normal Tuesday, let alone during a storm.

5. Write the reopening message first

Everybody remembers to announce that they're closing. Almost nobody announces that they're open again, and that's the message with money attached to it.

After a storm passes, there's a stretch of days where the whole city is trying to figure out who's back. Restaurants, tree services, roofers, auto shops, anyone with a walk-in door — that's your window, and it closes fast.

If you're a roofer, the storm leads are their own problem: they all show up at once, right when the office is busiest. That's what storm-season intake for roofers and home services is for. Set it up before the next storm, not during it.

So write that message today, while you're calm, and save it in your phone's notes: banner text, Google Post, one-sentence social update. Three lines. When you're back, you paste them and get on with your day.

The whole thing, in one list

• A closure banner built into your site, switched off, ready to flip on.
• Google Business Profile login confirmed — today, not later.
• Special Hours used for closures instead of "temporarily closed."
• Host, registrar, and web-person contact written down where you can reach it from your phone.
• Domain auto-renew on, with a card that isn't expired.
• Tap-to-call number, same on every platform, visible without scrolling.
• Closing message and reopening message pre-written and saved.

That's thirty minutes on a slow afternoon. Maybe forty-five if you have to hunt down a login.

None of it will feel urgent today, which is the entire point. The version of you who needs this has a generator running, a phone at 40 percent, and no interest whatsoever in learning how their website works.

Set it up now so that guy doesn't have to.

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If you're not sure whether your site can do any of this — or you can't remember who has the keys to it — that's a normal place to be. Send me a note and tell me what you've got. Happy to take a look and tell you where the gaps are.