9 Factors to Check before Buying Ready Made Websites

When buying a property, you are expected to exercise due diligence. Buying ready made websites is like buying a house too. There are certain things you find out and decide on before you buy a pre-made website.

We have taken time to highlight some of those factors.

9 Factors to Check before Buying a Ready Made Websites

1. Ownership

It is important that you confirm ownership of a website. This may be done on Whois. You should also check if the present owner of the website you are going to buy owns other similar websites that may be of competition to you.

2. Traffic

You should confirm the statistics on traffic provided to you by the seller. This can be done by asking the seller to show you the stats on the website’s traffic account such as Google Analytics. Also, request and confirm statistics of registered users and subscribers of the website. These will enable you to determine the monetary worth of the website.

3. Income

The income from the website is something you should also look into. How the website has been generating income and how much it has been generating. This is the only way you can understand the full financial status of the website you are buying.

4. History

History of the website you are buying is also important to understand the growth of the website. Checking history will also provide you with how long the website has been in existence- the longer it has been in existence the more its chances of continued existence. Doing your own independent research on the website’s history will aid you in deciding the authenticity of the seller’s information.

5. What’s the word on the street?

Using Majestic, you can check the backlinks to the website. This will help you get the website’s popularity. Backlinks also determine the website’s ranking on search engines. Also, type the site’s URL on search engines and check forums for what people are saying about the website. This will give you a feel of what’s up on the streets.

6. Monetary Value

When buying, you should do an appraisal of the domain name’s value. This may be automated or a manual appraisal. It will give you an idea of what the domain name is worth separately from the website itself.

7. Legal Issues

You don’t want to buy litigation or some legal complication. You should investigate things like plagiarism, patents, trademarks, and even claims to ownership of the website. A website should be clean on the legal front before you close the deal so as to avoid inheriting problems from the seller.

8. Cost of Maintenance

Unless you are an expert web developer, you’ll need to consider the technical state of the website (for example SEO) and what it will cost you to put the website up to optimal performance. To get this, you should consult with an expert and do a site analysis.

9. Google Penalty

You should check if the website has been delisted or penalized by Google as this would mean being shut off from traffic that’ll come from Google’s search engine.

The factors listed above are not exhaustive. You would want to make sure that you have vetted all available information regarding the website before you take the plunge