Now that you know the factors that affect your website’s sale price, let’s actually come up with a number for you! Each of these steps will give you a value—but the more you follow, the more realistic your valuation will become.
Step 1. Create a financial spreadsheet
The very first thing you should do to calculate your website’s worth is create a spreadsheet, which includes your profit and loss, add-backs, and net profit.
Here’s an example of what that may look like:
Website value profit & loss spreadsheet
You create a column for your revenue, then columns for each month. Do the same thing with your expenses. Revenue – Expenses = Net Profit.
Once you’ve listed your income and expenses, then you can create a section for add-backs (also called Discretionary Spending). These are expenses that the new owner won’t incur in the future or wouldn’t have incurred if they had owned the business.
For example, things like owner salaries, link building or content that created business growth, or web development.
Add-backs and discretionary spending calculator
With that done, calculate your net profit: Revenue – Expenses + Add-Backs = Net Profit.
Once you have the net profit for the last 12 months, simply add all of that together and divide by 12 to get your average monthly profit. Then take your average monthly profit and multiply it by 30 to 45 to get a range your website could sell for.
If that’s all you wanted—you’re done! But if you want to take it a step further and get a better idea of what you can realistically sell your website for, move on to step #2.
RECOMMENDATION
If your website doesn’t have any income and you purely want a valuation based on traffic, you can get a rough idea by using the traffic value metric in the Overview report from Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It represents an estimated monthly cost of traffic from all keywords a site is ranking for if paid via PPC.
Overview report of Ahrefs' site in Ahrefs' Site Explorer
Step 2. Contact website valuation companies
There are online websites/business brokers who can help evaluate the value of your website and help you find a buyer, negotiate terms, and close the sale.
Places like Empire Flippers and Flippa are examples of such brokers.
They will evaluate your website’s worth for free. Just head to their site and fill out a form, and you’ll know your site’s worth within a week.
I recommend going through this process even if you don’t actually plan on using their brokerage services because it will give you a much better idea of what your website can realistically sell for in the current market. They do this for a living, so they’re pretty good at it.
When you sign up, you’ll get a Seller’s Dashboard with questions to answer and, eventually, offers for your site.
Empire Flippers' Seller Dashboard
Once this part’s done, step #3 will help you get the best deal possible.
Step 3. Look for other interested parties to get the best deal
Working with brokers has a lot of perks: They whatsapp number list can find the buyer for you, help negotiate the deal, and ensure a seamless transition into the new owner’s hands. They also provide legal help and make it so you don’t need to hire an attorney or worry about contracts and other complex things.
However, to provide these services, they take a hefty fee. In Empire Flipper’s case, it’s 8% of the sale price up to the first $700K as of this writing.
If you want to get a better deal and take more home when you sell, you should consider finding the buyer yourself and hiring an attorney to oversee the deal. In the end, if your site is big enough, this will end up saving you money.
That said, if you have a smaller site, it may not be worth the hassle to save a tiny amount.
But if your site is bigger, you can find buyers in a lot of ways. You can reach out to competitors directly to see if they’re interested in acquiring you, or you can look to other parties who can benefit from owning your site.
For example, if you own a site about automotive work, you can reach out to mechanics or companies that sell auto parts or bloggers who write about similar topics.
It will be a lot of extra work and manual outreach to find yourself a buyer. But if you want the best price, it’s the only way to get it.