Depending on your objectives will depend on how you buy a website, if you should so wish to do so. Determining how much a website is worth is the difficult question many bloggers have to ask themselves before they buy or bid on a website. Yes, there are websites out there that check the value of websites. However, these are theoretical based on the public statistics of the websites. For this reaosn, here are three tips you can use to help determine how much you should spend on a website and what website to buy.

#1 Annual Profit * 1.5

With the websites I have bought in the past, I tend to look at the past 12 months profit the website made and then multiply it by 1.5 to give the estimated value of the website. This is quite similar to what businesses do when it comes to selling a business (however, the multiplication factor for businesses will more likely be 2 or 3 instead of 1.5). The reason the multiplication factor is low is because, at the end of the day, there is much more risks with websites. On the outside the traffic could seem really good and organic. However, after a Google SEO update, all traffic may stop if the website had been doing something search engines did not like.

#2 Maintenance Effort Required

Whatever website you are looking to buy, I can guarantee there will be some effort and time spent on just maintaining the website – to what extent is a different question. The more automated the website is at providing you revenue, the more expensive it will generally be. Therefore, you need to weigh up how much time you want to put into the website as if there needs to be lots of effort put in by the new owner, it will be cheaper which will reduce the break even point of the website purchase.

#3 Is it Unique?

Websites such as Flippa have many websites for sale on there that are pretty much automated and generate revenue every month. However, you will find the theme, design and even the content is not unique. Having everything unique will raise the price of a website. Do you need the theme to be unique? Probably not. However, one thing you should always make sure a potential website should have, if you are looking to purchase it, is that it has unique content. Having copied content will pretty much ruin the SEO of the website causing long term effects that will cost far more than the website is worth to fix.

Ultimately, it is always going to be a risk when it comes to buying a website: just like it is when it comes to buying a car too. If you are still unsure based on the above tips, there is one final tip you can use: make sure the website’s statistics are completely transparent. If the seller hides any statistics, warning lights should come on in your head as to why they have not shared such information with you: because it may reduce the value of the website from the seller’s point of view.