How to redesign your website without losing SEO: a pre-season checklist for Ibiza businesses

Why a redesign can wipe out your Google rankings

Google doesn't rank "your website" as a whole. It ranks individual URLs: the villa page that appears for "villa with pool Sant Josep", the weddings page, the German version of your menu. Each one has built up signals over the years, such as links from guides and blogs. A redesign that changes those addresses is technically a site migration, and rankings slip when any of the following changes unchecked:

• URLs change with no redirect. The new CMS generates different paths (/villas/can-sol becomes /properties/can-sol-ibiza), the old ones return 404 errors and every link pointing at them stops counting.
• Content disappears. Long descriptions, FAQs or area pages for Santa Eulària, Sant Antoni or Formentera are cut to "clean up" the design, and they were often the pages that ranked.
• Titles and meta descriptions are dropped. The new template labels every page "Home" or just the brand name.
• A forgotten noindex. The tag that kept the staging site out of Google goes live with the new site, and Google drops pages carrying noindex from its results entirely.
• Broken hreflang on multilingual sites. If the English, Spanish, German or Dutch versions stop referencing each other correctly, Google may show guests the wrong language.
• Slower pages. Full-screen video, heavy fonts and unoptimised effects punish people searching on a phone from a sunbed or a hotel room.

All of them are avoidable with an inventory, a redirect map and a careful launch.

When to redesign in Ibiza: October to March, never July or August

Google's guide to site moves recommends timing a move to coincide with lower traffic if your business is seasonal. For a website redesign in Ibiza, that means building between October and March and never relaunching in July or August, when a redirect error turns straight into lost bookings.

Google also warns that rankings can fluctuate during a significant change, and that a small or medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move. That buffer has to sit before the season, not inside it. Easter comes early in 2027: the Balearic public holiday calendar puts Good Friday on 26 March and Easter Monday on 29 March. If you winter abroad, fix approval dates early so the launch doesn't drift into April. A realistic schedule:

1. October and November: URL inventory and decisions on what stays.
2. December and January: design, build and content migration on a staging site.
3. February: redirects, technical review, mobile testing and relaunch.
4. March: monitoring and fixes before Easter and the May openings.

Step 1: inventory every URL and what already ranks

Before anyone opens a design tool, take a complete snapshot of the current site. Without the list of old URLs there can be no redirect map.

• Search Console Performance report. Select the longest date range available, so last season is covered in full, and export the Pages and Queries tabs. The Countries tab shows which markets find you, useful when guests book from the UK, Germany or the Netherlands.
• Links report. "Top linked pages" lists the URLs that press, guides and wedding directories link to. Don't lose them.
• Sitemap and CMS. Together they give you the full list, including forgotten pages that still get visits.
• Images and PDFs. Google asks you to include hosted files such as PDFs in the move. The brochure or wedding pack people find on Google needs a redirect too.
• Links you control. Your Google Business Profile, Instagram bio, Google Ads and Meta campaigns, directory listings and partner sites.

Put it all in a spreadsheet with one row per URL: clicks, top queries, external links and a decision (keep, merge or remove).

Step 2: decide what to keep and what to change

Relaunching a website doesn't mean starting from zero. Whatever works in Google is kept and improved; the purely visual layer can change freely:

Google advises changing one thing at a time: if you plan a new domain, CMS and layout, do them one after the other. Its Change of Address help adds that combining a domain move with a redesign of content and URL structure will probably cause some traffic loss, as Google may need to reassess individual pages.

Step 3: build the URL map and 301 redirects

For every old URL that changes, decide its exact destination on the new site. It is a two-column sheet, old URL and new URL, which your developer turns into permanent server-side redirects:

• /villa-es-cubells.html → /villas/es-cubells/
• /de/hochzeit.php → /de/hochzeiten-ibiza/
• /menu-summer.pdf → /en/menu/

Google's documentation on redirects sets out the rules:

• Permanent and server-side (301 or 308). Google treats them as a signal that the new URL should be canonical, and they don't cause a loss in PageRank.
• Each URL to its equivalent, not the home page. Redirecting many old URLs to the home page confuses users and may be treated as a soft 404. If you merge several pages into one, redirecting them all to the merged page is fine.
• No chains. Googlebot follows up to 10 hops, but Google advises redirecting straight to the final destination.
• Removed content returns 404 or 410. A package you no longer sell shouldn't redirect somewhere random.
• For as long as possible. Google's general guidance is at least one year.
• Internal links updated. Navigation, footer and buttons should point straight at the new URLs, and every new page needs a self-referencing canonical tag.

Step 4: titles, structured data and hreflang

Titles and meta descriptions

Copy the titles and descriptions that work before migrating content, then improve the weak ones. Google asks for titles that are descriptive, concise and distinct on every page, without keyword stuffing, and for unique meta descriptions, which it sometimes uses as the snippet in results. A template that gives every page of a Santa Eulària restaurant the same title is a step backwards.

Structured data

If your site has structured data, such as LocalBusiness markup with your address and opening hours, carry it over and validate it with the Rich Results Test. Google asks that markup only describes information visible on the page, so the seasonal opening hours in the code must match the ones guests see.

hreflang for English, Spanish and beyond

If your site runs in English and Spanish, or in German, Dutch or Italian too, review the hreflang annotations against the new URLs:

• Every language version lists itself and all the others, using fully qualified URLs (https://).
• Annotations must be reciprocal: if two pages don't point to each other, Google ignores them.
• Add an x-default for the language selector or a neutral home page.
• Don't redirect visitors automatically based on the language you assume they speak. Google advises against it, because it can stop users and search engines from seeing every version.

Our guide to multilingual websites for Ibiza hotels and restaurants covers this in depth.

Step 5: staging and launch-day checks

Build the new site on a password-protected staging environment. If you use noindex or block crawling during development, Google suggests preparing in advance the list of what you will remove at launch. One technical trap: if a page is blocked in robots.txt, Google never sees its noindex.

On launch day, work through this list:

If the new site is slower than the old one, hold the launch: here is why a slow website doesn't show up on Google.

Search Console's Change of Address tool is only needed when moving to a different domain or subdomain, say from a .co.uk or .de address to a .com. It isn't used for HTTP to HTTPS, www to non-www, or moving pages within the same domain, where redirects and an updated sitemap are enough. If you do change domain, Google recommends keeping the old one registered for at least a year so that nobody else can buy it and misuse it.

Step 6: monitor for 4–8 weeks and update your Google Business Profile

Fluctuations are normal while Google recrawls the site; the job is telling them apart from genuine errors. Check Search Console every week:

• Page indexing report. A rise in "Not found (404)", "Redirect error" or "URL marked ‘noindex’" points to a specific fault you can fix.
• Performance report. Compare clicks and impressions by page with the same period last year. In a seasonal business, comparing March with January tells you nothing about the redesign.
• Your key searches. The queries you already ranked for, from your brand name to "boutique hotel Ibiza Town", should start showing the new URLs.

Then update everything pointing to the site. In your Google Business Profile, edit the Website field with the full URL, including https://, and check any booking or ordering links your category allows. After that come Instagram, ads, directories and partner sites: Google suggests asking linking sites to update their links, starting with those that send the most visitors.

A good redesign should lift your image, speed and direct bookings without sacrificing what already works in Google. At Grow Ibiza we follow the order set out above, with the inventory and redirects before any design work. Our website redesign service in Ibiza explains the process, and you can explore the live 3D demo sites for a villa, hotel, beach club, nightclub and yacht charter.

Frequently asked questions