77% of the year’s hours fall outside your opening hours

Put the question another way: over a year, how many hours is your website being read while nobody can answer? With standard 9-to-5 weekday hours, the answer is more than three quarters of the year.

The calculation

2026 has 365 days, 261 of them Monday to Friday. Of France’s eleven national public holidays, nine fall on a weekday: 1 January, Easter Monday, 1 May, 8 May, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, 14 July, 11 November and Christmas Day. 15 August and All Saints’ Day fall at the weekend.

If you open 9 am to 6 pm, the share drops to 74.1%. The order of magnitude does not change: your business is closed most of the time.

The longest closures

An ordinary weekend, from Friday 5 pm to Monday 9 am, lasts 64 hours. Long weekends stretch the wait: from Friday 3 April at 5 pm to Tuesday 7 April at 9 am, the Easter closure lasts 88 hours. The Whitsun weekend and Christmas, which falls on a Friday in 2026, produce the same length.

What this number does not say

This is a calculation about the calendar, not about your visitors. Website traffic is not spread evenly: a business site may be busier during the day, a consumer site in the evening. To know how many visits happen out of hours, look at the hourly breakdown in your analytics tool.

What the calculation does show is how long the window is during which a visitor with a question cannot reach anyone. A contact form records the request, but it does not answer it.

What to do with those 6,744 hours

• Measure the real share of your visits and enquiries that arrive out of hours.
• Show your opening hours next to your phone number, so nobody calls into an empty office.
• Offer an instant answer out of hours: a chat agent can answer common questions and collect contact details for a call back on the next working day.