Where to buy or sell a website?
In case you would like to buy or sell a domain name, you are welcome to read this article (link to future article). This article is about buying or selling a fully developed website (with content, visitors and SEO-ranking).
What is the best place to buy/sell websites?
If you try to google ‘buy a website’, you will definitely see tons of adverts for companies that sell them. We strongly recommend not to visit those as they are merely development companies. They offer to build your website from scratch, with no SEO-ranking and no visitors.
Below we described trusted resources where you can purchase or sell a website.
Website marketplaces
You have probably heard about domain marketplaces where people buy and sell domains (without content). There are similar marketplaces for developed websites as well. Flippa and FE International are one of the most popular and secure website marketplaces. After the initial negotiation, the company may refer you to a third party to conduct an independent review. This is a nice feature that ensures that the price-quality ratio of the website you’re purchasing is good. In addition, there is also a possibility that you will be offered broker services. This is the company representative that guarantees that the transaction will go smoothly, without any issues from both sides. So make sure that the marketplace you choose proffers at least one of the above-mentioned services.
Forums
Nowadays there are many forums that have domain and website marketplaces. You can find a warrantor/broker that will ensure transaction security as well. It will be cheaper but less secure than buying/selling a domain on a marketplace.
You can sell or buy a website on Digital point. It is one of the most popular forums. The required topic is here. Also, dnforum.com and namepros.com are worth a try.
How to avoid being scammed when purchasing/selling a website?
There are 3 ways to avoid this kind of situation:
- In case you are considering using specialized marketplaces (such as Flippa), they will offer an independent review or broker service. These services are usually paid, however, they ensure the security of the transaction.
- You can also find a broker/warrantor on a forum. Basically, this is an intermediary. The buyer transfers money to him while the seller transfers the domain and website ownership to him as well. Afterwards the warrantor passes the website ownership to the buyer and, if everything is fine, the money is transferred to the website owner. It is quite hard to find an honest warrantor/broker because there are a lot of scammers amongst them. Though, the pricing for this kind of service on forums is lower than on marketplaces.
- Another option is to find a company that ensures the transaction security. We would recommend Escrow for this purpose as it was tested by our experts. The website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Also, they provide phone and email support in English.
How is the website pricing determined?
The formula is quite easy: net income for 6 months is multiplied by the corresponding coefficient (1, 2, 3 or 4). The result will give the buyer an opportunity to evaluate the return on investment that can be expected within 0.5-2 years.
How to estimate the website price?
The following factors may influence the website’s price:
Domain name
This is, basically, the name of the website. Even if your website does not generate much income but you own the sex.com domain name, you can sell it for millions of dollars. We have a separate article about domain name price evaluation, by the way.
Traffic
Traffic is the number of visitors you get. Nowadays the quality of traffic matters more than the actual amount of visitors per day. For instance, let's say you have a website that sells cars. In case your marketing campaign led 10 wealthy customers that are looking forward to purchasing a Ferrari, this traffic will be more valuable than thousands of kids who accidentally reached your website while searching for a place to download a racing simulator.
Note! When planning on purchasing a certain website, make sure that you’ve thoroughly researched the visit statistics during a large period of time. Also, check how are the visitors directed to that website. There are lots of black marketing strategies that allow to attract thousands of visitors. Usually, visitors acquired in that way leave the website within the first few seconds, however, this still greatly improves the overall statistics.
Website subject
If the income is generated with the means of contextual advertising or link building, then the subject of the website will matter greatly. For example, finance, real estate and automobiles are considered to be one of the most expensive subjects. They generate a greater income than sites about food, games, movies etc. In other cases, net income matters more than website’s subject.
Average monthly income
This is the net income (excluding development and maintenance cost). This factor allows you to estimate how much time will it take for you to get a return on investment.
In order for the website to generate good income, you don’t have to choose an expensive subject. It will take a lot of time and money to advertise, develop and hire the staff to maintain websites of this kind. So, if you choose a cheaper subject and your website will still attract approximately 50,000 visitors per day, your income will be on a quite good level.
PR (PageRank) and CI (citation index)
These indicators matter only if the website will be used for advertising and link building.
The following factors do not influence the price in any way:
CMS
Usually, it does not influence the price at all as, in most of the cases, the sites are built using free CMSs. In rare cases they’re built on paid ones, however, as we mentioned before, the development cost is not included to the total website cost. Custom-built CMSs are the only exception. If it is unique, it can slightly influence the website price. Though, usually development companies transfer only the rights to use this kind of CMS but not the right to sell it to others.
Website development cost
Only the current state of the website matters. The cost of the website development, management, design, marketing campaigns etc is not included to the website price.
Directory listings
Same goes for directory listings. They don’t influence the website price as well.
Best online services for evaluating the website
Flippa and FE International offer free website evaluation. They take into consideration lots of different factors such gross income, net income, visitors etc. We recommend to use their services as these are trusted and secure resources.
Of course, there are lots of other online services that can evaluate your website. They take into consideration only quantitative indicators (CI, PR, visitor statistics) but not the average income. Even if they do take the income into account, the qualitative indicators are still not considered. As a result, these resources can establish a price of $50 for websites that are worth $10 000-30 000. Due to this, before auctioning your website we recommend to visit several forums and create topics to find out the approximate price of your website.
How to find the website owner?
Before GDPR implementation, it was quite easy to find the owner of the website. You could easy make a Whois check and see the contact email address. Nowadays, it is impossible to find this information in public Whois for domains registered in Europe due to GDPR. You can read more about this regulation here (paste link). So, the only way to find the website owner is to visit the website (if it is responding), locate the ‘Contacts’ section and try to reach the website owner using the contacts indicated.
We highly recommend not to purchase the cheapest hosting package. Usually, they come with a row of issues: the server is often down, the hardware is outdated, lousy and slow support, registration and payment errors, etc.
For your convenience, we have created a tool that can help you to choose the right hosting package for you just by answering a few simple questions.
CMS is a content management system. A lot of hosting providers offer so-called CMS optimized packages. However, this is a marketing trick because most CMSs do not have special software or hosting requirements.
Trial period is a period of time, usually from 7 to 30 days, during which you can use the hosting services for free to test them.
Moneyback policy allows the customer to receive a refund for his order within a certain period after the purchase.
OS means the operating system is installed on the server. We recommend to choose Linux hosting unless your website requires another OS.
Bulletproof hosting - it’s a type of service that allows to host almost any type of content, even the restricted one (adult content, warez, spam etc). Bulletproof hosting providers do not remove your content in case someone reports an abuse.
Unlimited hosting - refers to companies that provide packages with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, number of domains, databases or email accounts, etc. This is usually a marketing trick but sometimes you can find something worth a try.
Secure hosting - it’s a type of service when the hosting provider is mostly responsible for the security of the user’s account: updates the software installed on their servers, provides an antivirus and malware scanner, firewalls and basic anti-DDoS protection, etc.
DDoS-protected hosting - companies that provide packages that include anti-DDoS protection. These packages are considerably more expensive than regular ones. Nevertheless, they’re totally worth their price because the company will ensure that your website is secured from cyber attacks.
Most websites require MySQL and PHP installed on the server to work correctly. Almost all hosting providers support these technologies.
ASP.NET is a Microsoft web application development platform.
The more comfortable the control panel is, the easier will it be for you to change the website and hosting account settings.
Most hosting providers that are in TOP20 in our rating offer user-friendly control panels, such as cPanel, Plesk or DirectAdmin. That’s why we recommend to pay attention to other, more important parameters, while choosing a hosting provider.