Website slow or not showing on Google? How to decide between a fix and a rebuild

Three problems that look like one

Separate three situations first, because each one has a different fix:

• Google has not indexed your site. You do not appear even for your exact business name, which is precisely what a guest searches after finding you on a booking platform and deciding to book direct. If they cannot find you, they go back to the platform and you pay the commission. This is usually a technical problem with a quick fix.
• You are indexed but invisible for what matters. Your name comes up, but not "villa rental Ibiza" or "yacht charter Ibiza". Here content and local signals carry the weight.
• You show up, but you have a slow website. Visitors arrive and leave before booking. Google uses Core Web Vitals in its ranking systems, but warns that good scores do not guarantee top rankings.

The 15-minute self-check

You need your phone, a laptop and access to the Google account that manages the website. Ideally the account is yours, not your former developer's.

1. The site: search (2 minutes)

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If nothing appears, Google has not indexed your site. If pages do appear, check that your homepage, your service pages and every language version are there (for example site:yourdomain.com/es). Google points out that the site: operator does not necessarily return every indexed URL, so treat it as a thermometer, not an inventory.

2. Search Console's Page indexing report (5 minutes)

Search Console is a free Google service that alerts you when Google finds indexing problems. If nobody ever set it up, that is your first fix. If you have it, open the Page indexing report and look at the "Why pages aren't indexed" table. The most telling reasons are "URL marked 'noindex'", "URL blocked by robots.txt", "Server error (5xx)" and duplicates.

3. Inspect your homepage (3 minutes)

Paste your homepage address into the search bar at the top of Search Console. The URL Inspection tool will say "URL is on Google" or "URL is not on Google", with the reason. Look at two lines: "Crawl allowed?" (a "No" points to robots.txt) and "Indexing allowed?" (a "No" points to noindex). Once fixed, click "Test live URL" and then "Request indexing".

4. PageSpeed Insights on mobile (3 minutes)

Run your homepage and your booking page through PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab. Start with the real-user data: it covers the previous 28 days and is what counts for Core Web Vitals. Below it sits the lab score, a simulated load on a mid-range phone; 90 or above is considered good. With little traffic there may be no real-user data, so you will rely on the lab test, bearing in mind that good lab data does not necessarily mean real users have a good experience.

5. robots.txt, noindex and your Business Profile (2 minutes)

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are asking every search engine not to crawl anything. Then search your homepage source code for the word "noindex". Finally, check that your Google Business Profile links to your current domain, on https, not to an old site.

Core Web Vitals: the three thresholds that matter

Core Web Vitals measure what real visitors experience on your site. According to web.dev, a page passes when it meets all three targets at the 75th percentile of page loads, measured separately for mobile and desktop. In plain English: at least three out of four visits need to go well, not just yours on the office fibre.

The "needs improvement" and "poor" bands are the ones PageSpeed Insights uses. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console groups similar pages and splits mobile from desktop. One more useful number, although it is not a Core Web Vital: TTFB, the time until the first byte of your server's response arrives, which PageSpeed rates as good up to 800 ms. If it is high, look at hosting and redirects before you touch the design.

Your real visitor: a phone on a beach or a laptop in Munich

Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, and notes that most searches are now done from mobile devices. In Ibiza that means a guest looking for dinner from a sunbed on patchy 4G, or from a boat on the way to Formentera.

Many of your guests also find you and book from home, before they ever set foot on the island. Among the causes of a high TTFB, web.dev lists visitors located far away from the nearest site server and visitors on poor network conditions, and recommends a content delivery network (CDN). If your server is far from your guests and you have no CDN, every visit pays for that distance.

There is a language catch, too: Googlebot usually crawls from the USA without setting a language preference. If your site switches language with a cookie or the browser setting, without separate URLs, Google might not find all your language versions.

The usual culprits on Ibiza business websites

1. A leftover noindex or robots.txt block from the previous developer. Common when a site goes live from a staging copy and nobody removes the block. In WordPress, one ticked box, "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" under Settings, Reading, adds a noindex tag to the whole site. And if robots.txt blocks a page, Google never sees its noindex rule and may still list the URL without a description.
2. Nobody has Search Console. The site was handed over and nobody receives Google's alerts, so problems pile up unnoticed.
3. Cheap, slow hosting. An overloaded server with no caching or CDN, far from your guests: a high TTFB gives it away.
4. Giant images and sliders. The hero shot goes up straight off the drone. Large above-the-fold carousels often contain the LCP element, and web.dev calls loading carousel content with JavaScript probably the single biggest performance mistake to avoid with carousels. Your main image should also never be lazy-loaded.
5. Bloated page builders and plugins. Many plugins add code that competes for the phone's processor. Long tasks and a very large DOM delay responses and worsen INP: you tap "Book" and nothing happens.
6. Thin or duplicated pages. Five near-identical pages for Ibiza Town, San Antonio, Santa Eulalia, San José and San Juan, changing only the place name, edge towards what Google calls doorway abuse. One strong page per service works better.
7. No local signals. Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence takes into account how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. An incomplete Business Profile, or winter hours in high season, works against you.
8. English-only or Spanish-only content. An English-only site will struggle to appear in Spanish or German searches. Translating just the menus is not enough either: Google works out the language from the visible content, not the code.

Fix or rebuild your website? The decision table

Whether to fix or rebuild a website depends on what you find. If it sits in the middle column, fix it; if the right-hand column keeps ringing true, a rebuild usually pays off better than patch after patch.

One very Ibiza test: can you change a price, the menu or your season opening hours without phoning anyone? If every edit depends on a developer who no longer answers, the expensive part is not the website, it is everything you cannot update in August.

Quick fix or redesign before the season

A quick fix can lift an indexing block, and a slow website fix (optimised images, caching, fewer plugins) can speed up loading considerably. What it cannot shorten is Google's timetable: according to Search Console Help, indexing after a request typically takes a day or so, but can take up to a week or two, and validating a fix typically takes up to about two weeks, sometimes much longer. Real-user data in PageSpeed covers 28 days, so speed gains show up gradually.

If your year is made between May and October, decide when the season closes: a fix can be done calmly over winter, while a redesign needs time to go live before Easter or, at the latest, before May.

If you rebuild, keep or redirect the URLs that already bring visitors, as we explain in how to redesign a website without losing SEO, and give every language its own URL, as covered in our guide to multilingual websites for Ibiza hotels and restaurants. On the website redesign in Ibiza page you can try Grow Ibiza's live 3D demo sites, and if budget is the question, start with how much a website costs in Ibiza.

Before Easter, run through this list:

Frequently asked questions