Are you wondering how much your website is worth?
Buying and selling websites is a massive industry. Besides, even if you are not selling your website, knowing its value can help you feel good about its progress and stay motivated to keep growing it.
In this article, we will show you how to figure out how much your website is worth. We will also talk about buying and selling websites in general.
Here is a quick overview of the topics we will cover in this article:
- Why Find Out Your Website’s Worth?
- What Factors Affect a Website’s Value?
- Buying and Selling Website Domains
- Website Worth Calculator
- Where to Sell Your Website
- How to Sell Your Website at the Highest Price
- Frequently Asked Questions About Selling Websites
Ready? Let’s begin.
Why Find Out Your Website’s Worth?
Buying and selling websites is one of the most popular online business ideas. Each day, thousands of people make websites to launch their businesses online.
If you keep working on growing your WordPress website and business, then with each passing day, the value of your website will keep increasing.
Finding out the true market value of your website helps you achieve the following:
- Motivation: You can visualize the potential market value of your website in real numbers. This information can be a motivational tool to help you grow your online business to the next milestone.
- Strategize: You can see what makes a website particularly attractive for potential buyers and start adding value to your own website.
- Compare offers: Perhaps someone has already made an offer to buy your website, and you want to see how much your website is worth in the market.
- Make a Selling Decision: Maybe you are just exploring your options and want to move on to some other project if you can get the right price for your website.
That being said, let’s take a look at what factors affect a website’s potential worth.
What Factors Affect a Website’s Value?
The following are some of the most important factors that affect a website’s worth and potential value on the market.
These are the most common elements that a potential buyer will look into to determine the potential worth of your website.
However, some factors may be less or more important than others depending on your website’s niche and the buyer’s interest in your business.
1. Website Earnings
Website earnings means the amount of money your website earned during the last few months. A potential buyer will look at this information to see how much money they will be able to make after buying your website.
They will also look into the sources of income on your website, such as AdSense or other advertisement revenue, affiliate marketing income, products sold in your online store, and more.
Typically, websites with more than one source of income are considered more valuable by potential buyers.
Apart from earnings, a potential buyer may also look at profits generated by a website. Profit is usually calculated by subtracting the operating costs from the total revenue.
Websites with no earnings are usually harder to sell. However, a buyer may still be interested in overall traffic, subscribers, and other factors that could potentially bring them good business.
2. Traffic Analytics
Websites with higher traffic attract more interest from potential buyers and are generally considered more valuable.
To get an idea of your website’s traffic analytics, you can use a plugin like MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It helps you collect historical traffic analytics data, which will be useful in determining your website’s worth.
First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, the plugin will ask you to connect MonsterInsights to your Google Analytics account. Simply follow the on-screen instructions to finish the setup.
Once connected, you can view your website’s traffic reports by visiting the Insights » Reports page in the WordPress admin area.
However, page views and website visitors alone do not guarantee a higher price for a website. Other traffic analytics also affect a website’s potential market value.
For instance, the geographic location of website visitors, how much time they spend on your website, conversion rates, and other factors may also be considered during the evaluation.
Another important factor is the type of traffic you are getting to your website.
For instance, organic traffic coming from search engines is considered more valuable than paid traffic coming through advertisements and affiliate partners.
MonsterInsights will help you capture all this data, present it in human-readable format, and let you export it as PDF files to share with potential buyers.
For more information, you can see our guide on how to track website visitors to your WordPress site.
3. Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) refers to a website’s potential reputation on search engines.
Websites with higher reputations have more authority and are often ranked higher much quicker than other websites.
Search engines like Google don’t generally offer data like domain reputation. However, several third-party services like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz offer domain authority testers of their own.
We recommend using Semrush, as it is one of the most comprehensive search engine marketing platforms on the market.
Tip: Semrush also has a free plan that gives you access to limited but highly useful features, including a domain authority checker.
Once you have signed in to your Semrush account, go to the ‘Domain Overview’ section and enter your domain name.
You will then find your domain authority score under the Authority Score, along with the Semrush Domain Rank value. The higher the number, the better your domain authority.
Here are some basic factors that these tools consider to determine your domain authority:
- Age of a domain name (when your domain name was first registered)
- Backlinks from third-party websites pointing to that domain name.
- Internal links pointing to different areas of a domain name
- How often search engines rank your website
- The average of your search engine ranking positions (SERPs)
Generally, it takes a lot of time and consistency to build a higher domain authority.
If you are just starting a blog or a website, then you should first focus on establishing your brand reputation and domain authority.
A good place to start is our WordPress SEO guide for beginners, which walks you through the proper SEO setup for your website from day one.
4. Additional Assets Accompanying Your Website
Selling a website means selling the business associated with your website, its brand reputation, and other digital and physical assets.
All of them add value to your website’s potential worth on the market.
For instance, a typical WordPress blog may have an active email newsletter, social media profiles, a YouTube channel, a Facebook group, and more.
Let’s say you are selling digital downloads. The rights to those digital downloads will add more value to your website.
Similarly, if you run an eCommerce store with an inventory to manage, then that stock will add more value to your website.
Additionally, your business contacts with vendors, suppliers, and affiliate partners will add more value to your website if they are willing to work with the new owner.
Buying and Selling Website Domains
Often, a potential buyer may want to purchase a website just to get the domain name.
Your website’s domain name could be worth a lot more than the contents of the website itself.
Here are some scenarios when a potential customer may want to get a domain name:
- The domain name matches the name of a startup and growing brand.
- Some domain names are meaningful and more marketable for some other businesses.
- Businesses may want to use clever domain names as short URLs.
- It is a high-authority domain name with healthy backlinks and an excellent SEO reputation.
These domain names are often referred to as premium domain names. Your website may seem not particularly profitable, but the domain name could still be valuable and attract potential buyers.
There are several domain appraisal tools available online that can help you find a rough estimate of your domain name’s potential value.
For instance, GoDaddy’s domain appraisal tool considers a domain’s age, uniqueness, extension, and more to generate an estimate.
You simply need to visit the free GoDaddy domain appraisal tool and enter your domain name.
However, domain appraisal tools are not perfect, and your domain’s actual value could be a lot higher or lower than the appraisal value.
You can even sell your domain name separately using platforms like GoDaddy Domain Auctions. This is a domain name marketplace where interested buyers can bid on listed domain names to buy them.
You’ll need to sign up for a GoDaddy Auctions membership to list your domain name, which costs $4.99 per year.
Here are some other domain name marketplaces that you can explore to sell your premium domain name:
- Flippa
- Sedo.com
- NamePros
Website Worth Calculator
A website value calculator is an online tool that helps you calculate your website’s potential worth based on the information you provide.
This information includes website traffic analytics, estimated earnings, social media profiles, email lists, and more.
However, keep in mind that these website value calculators are appraisal tools and only provide an estimate. You need to carefully use this information to make your own business decisions.
Quick Website Value Calculation Formula
Before you use an online website value calculator, you can use the following formula to get a basic estimate of your website’s potential worth.
Basically, a website’s potential worth can be anywhere between
20-50 times the monthly website earnings.
For instance, if a website makes $1000 per month, then its potential value could be anywhere between $20,000 to $50,000.
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