Buying a Website? Tips How To Do It In A Right Way
It can be an excellent investment to buy an information website with significant traffic. There are a number of ways you can make money from it with very low running costs. And you don’t need to spend much time on the site if it is already popular. At the same time – it is enough to monitor indicators and update articles – it can become a source of passive income.
In this case, the purchase of a website is similar to the purchase of a ready-made business – conventionally, you are buying something that is already working and making money. However, no one can guarantee with any certainty that everything will remain the same after the transaction is completed.
Therefore, buying a site is a very serious decision. It’s an investment, and it depends on the website choice whether it will pay off or not.
Where To Buy A Website
When you think about purchasing the website, you have only two possible options where you can do it properly. The first one, and the most obvious, is a marketplace like Flippa or Empire Flippers, where there are a lot of variants that will suit almost any taste in any niche. With direct sales and auctions, of course, to add more methods of buying a site for you. And another option for purchase is a direct contact with the organization that owns the one website you want with a preliminary request for the sale of the site, and holding off negotiations.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. On marketplaces, you have solid information about the website. But it also puts you in direct competition with other deep-pocketed potential buyers and limits your choices.
On the other hand, private negotiations about buying a site can often help you establish a more personal connection with the seller. And this can play into your hands when it comes to making a deal. But to make sure that you are not buying a dummy website, you will need to seriously delve into this issue and study the site you are buying from all sides, which may take quite a lot of time and effort.
How To Buy A Website In A Right Way
It’s easier than ever to get online and create your own website. However, there are many reasons to consider buying an existing site. There are some basic things to consider if you are interested in purchasing a website that has already been created for commercial use.
Website Platform
The first thing you need to consider is the platform on which your site will be built. Nowadays, the top ones among the CMS systems are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. So if a website you’re trying to buy is using this one, then you’ll have little to no problems with it. Especially if you’ve worked with one of those systems before.
There are many professional websites that are built from scratch using code along with these popular template-based options. Choosing a platform is important because it will affect many of your decisions. These include, but are not limited to, cost, access to experts, design flexibility, and much more.
Domain Authority
Domain authority is important, especially if you want to get sponsored reviews or high paying ads. In addition, if you find a site with high domain authority, it means that the site is well optimized and has high-quality backlinks from multiple sources. A high domain authority site is more likely to be a quality website. In addition, the higher the domain authority score, the higher the price of the site will be.
Domain History
The history of a website or domain is critical to determining how successful it’s going to become. You should have access to detailed historical information and analytics reports before purchasing a site. You can check it yourself using host-tracker.com/en/ic/whois-check service to gather all data. And things you need to check include how the site was designed and developed, the domain’s age, Google penalties, growth trends, and more.
Target Audience
You need to know how to properly assess the value of a site before you buy it. Looking at the target audience is one of the most important ways to do this. Does the website have an established and well-defined target audience that it has been successful in reaching? If so, is the existing audience the same as or complementary to the audience that you are hoping to target with the site?
High-Quality Content
When you buy a new site on the platform, make sure the content is well-written and free of errors. Using tools such as Originality, you can even check if it was written by artificial intelligence. By the way, if the content has been properly proofread and corrected by a good writer and has a high degree of originality, content created by artificial intelligence is not a bad thing.
SEO
Search engine optimization can be expensive and time consuming. If you’re going to buy a website, it’s best to buy one that already has great, long-established SEO results. Think about the keywords and phrases the site is ranking for, and make sure they are relevant to the audience you want to target. Consider your SEO situation and the likelihood of maintaining this situation in the long run.
Overall Website Workload
It is very important to be aware of the amount of work that is involved in the maintenance of the site in its current state. Take some time to talk to the current site owner about how much time he or she spends managing the site, what his or her responsibilities are, and whether he or she hires outside help for any aspects of managing the website.
Spend some time researching how much it would cost to replace the current owner if he or she has a role that requires skills you don’t have. And be sure to have monitoring in place. Consider opting in for a good service for website availability monitoring – 24\7 on hosttracker will be a great help for newbies.
UI and UX Design
For many people this may not be the deciding factor, but in fact it is an opportunity to buy a site cheap and the only thing left to do is to fix its design. A site for sale with a poor interface and design, but with quality content, is an opportunity not to be missed. The reason is that the owner may be selling it on the cheap, and this could be an opportunity for you to quickly flip the website.
Overall Usability And Technical Flaws
It’s probably best to keep something that’s working well at the time you buy the website. To get a realistic idea of what can be left as is and what may need to be overhauled, talk to the current owners about what works and what doesn’t. And, again, consider setting up a proper site monitoring routine to have a constant check up on everything – it’s better ping host all the time with hosttracker and have all vital metrics tested, than be sorry that you missed something.
Financial Potential
Finally, because buying a site that is not profitable now and has no realistic plans for future profits is just a waste of your money, it is important to review the website’s financial information. Take some time and review the financial statements of the site and look for a solid business strategy, stable cash flow and sound decisions.
