Valuing your website can be tricky if you don’t know what to look at. There are many different factors to consider that can all play a role in how much a website is worth. What you value your website at, on a personal level, may be completely different than its true value. In a nutshell, a website is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.

But how do you know what someone is willing to pay for it? Well, you can normally work out an estimate for this by assessing a few key details about your site. To help you with this, what follows are the most important factors involved in your website’s worth, as well as the best ways that you can improve its value.

Here are some interesting facts on website functionality:

• 89% of consumers shop with a competitor after a poor user experience.
• Slow-loading websites lead to a $2.6 billion revenue loss each year.
• 83% of people expect a website to load in 3 seconds or less.

Determining Your Website Value

Assess the Business Model

When asking yourself, “How much is my website worth?” you should be questioning the overall business model of your site and gauging how much profitability it would have for another owner. Here is a visual of the Business Model and some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you sell physical products and make money on your website that way, or do you generate revenue from ads or affiliate products? 
• Are profits made from your website increasing over time, remaining consistent, or declining? 
• How much net profit do you make after accounting for any overhead expenses? 
• Is the website scalable, or in other words, can it become even larger and more profitable from its current state without too much effort?

These are the main questions a prospective buyer of any website would ask. So the answers to these questions are what will help to determine your website’s value. A website that sells physical products, for example, could be worth more or less than a site that sells affiliate products.

Physical products could possibly require manufacturing and shipping costs, whereas affiliate products are often digital items that cost nothing. Additionally, if a website’s revenue is growing over time, the website value may be much higher than a site with a static or unvarying revenue stream. Website values are often based on not only their current or trailing profits, but also any anticipated future profits as well.

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Compare to Recently Sold Websites

The internet and the demand for certain products or trends are constantly changing. This means that you should be comparing your website to others in the same category or niche which have recently sold online. There are many different online website marketplaces or auction sites where you can browse through specific categories to see what some websites have recently sold for. Here is one such site, called EmpireFlippers:

(Image credit: inspirationfeed)

Now, while there are some website worth estimation tools available online for free, these usually aren’t very accurate because they don’t normally compare your site to recently sold ones. So if you’re saying to yourself, “How can I just see my website worth somewhere?” the website auction sites are the closest you can get to that.

You can look at a list of similar websites and their sale prices to at least get a ballpark idea of what your site’s value may be. Just remember to also compare their business model to yours, not just the type of content they have or the niche they’re in. You should also find websites that have traffic similar to yours as well. As an example, if your site has 1000 visitors per day, then you should find a similar site that has roughly close to the same number of visitors.

Determine the Level of Owner Involvement

Even if you’re not planning on selling your website to someone else, you still need to determine what the level of owner involvement would be if you were to sell it. How hands-on would another owner have to be in order to keep the website running smoothly? The less owner involvement in the website, the better. Expenses cut into revenue, and when an owner doesn’t have the energy or time to manage a site they will have to spend money to hire others who can. So while you’re wondering, “How much is my site worth?” you need to determine if it’s worth the same to someone else who may not have the same passion or time to invest in it.

Gauge the Consistency of Traffic

Your visitors are one of your greatest assets. Without them, your products and ads have no value. You simply can’t ask, “How much is my website worth?” without factoring in the number, quality, and behavior of your visitors. Here is an example of the Ahrefs Traffic Tool:

How consistent has the visitor traffic been over time? Are your visitors seasonal or do they come to your website consistently throughout the year? Do they visit many different pages on your website, or do most of them land and then stay on the same page? These questions help to determine the type of interest your visitors have and how they might behave over time, particularly when new products or topics are introduced.

The consistency of the traffic that shows in any analytics program will be important to any prospective buyers and it should therefore factor into the valuation of the site. Nobody wants to purchase a site that has unreliable traffic or visitors that only show interest in a single product or piece of content on a site. It’s incredibly difficult to scale up this type of business model.

Identify Sources of Traffic

In addition to the consistency of the traffic, the source of where it’s coming from is equally as important to the value of your site. With websites, there are three different types of traffic sources; Direct, referral, and search. For example:

(Image credit: Ahrefs)

• Direct traffic: This normally means that visitors are coming directly to the website by typing in the URL address. This type of traffic can be good in some circumstances, but it can also affect the value of the website. It’s difficult to determine why the visitors are coming to the site, so anybody thinking of purchasing the site may think twice about it.
• Referral traffic: Referral traffic is often the best source of traffic. This is when visitors find your website by clicking links that have been posted on other websites. This is easier for prospective buyers to gauge because they can use various tools and programs to determine exactly where your traffic is coming from. When they can see where the traffic originates from, they can assess whether this is likely to be a stable or long-term source of traffic or not.
• Search traffic: This is when visitors find your website by performing a search in a search engine online. If your website has good search engine optimization (SEO), then you’re likely to receive many visitors from this source. However, a website’s rankings in search engines can change frequently, for better or for worse. For this reason, this type of traffic is sometimes not quite as beneficial as referral traffic.

Improving Your Website’s Worth

Tighten Up Your SEO

To improve how valuable your website is, you should first work on improving SEO. Do an inventory of your site by making a list of all pages and whether you think each page has enough quality content on it or not.

If you have pages with thin content, such as small articles that have less than 1,000 words, you should bulk these up and add more. Any pages with old content should receive fresh updates by adding more content to them as well. Search engines normally like fresh content. This can play a role in how your website ranks in search engines, which can affect how many visitors you receive from them. The exception to this is evergreen content, which is content that can be applied to the present time even if it was written in the past.

While evergreen content may not need to receive updates as frequently as outdated content, adding an update to it won’t hurt. Search engines looking for fresh content aren’t perfect and sometimes they may have trouble discerning the difference between outdated and evergreen content. Here is an image that demonstrates the difference between evergreen and timely content:

(Image credit: newbreedmarketing)

Also, you should work on building backlinks to your site by writing guest posts for other sites in your niche which are considered authoritative. Sometimes these backlinks can play a major role in how credible your website appears to search engines, and this has the potential to improve your site’s SEO as well. Many website developers often say, “It’s amazing how much my website value increased after I started paying attention to my backlinks.”

Additionally, you should always consider your website’s functionality as well. Are users on smartphones or mobile devices able to navigate your site just as easily as those on desktop computers? What is the loading the time for each page when a visitor arrives? Before asking yourself, “How worth is my website?” These are the important questions you should be asking instead. Your website’s worth will suffer if the SEO is not up to par.

We hope that you found this article useful.

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Introduce New Revenue Streams

Since your website’s revenue is such a key factor in its valuation, you should be brainstorming and thinking of ways to introduce new revenue streams. Not only would more revenue automatically improve the value of the site, but different sources of revenue can also cause an increase in website worth. Here is one example of a revenue stream or model:

(Image credit: SlideGeeks)

Imagine that a prospective buyer is interested in purchasing your website. They may feel nervous about buying it if they see that the revenue is only coming from one source. The world is sometimes an unpredictable place and anything can potentially happen to disrupt a single revenue stream.

Having multiple revenue streams means less risk to those who are looking to purchase a website. It means that if something happens to one source of revenue, the other sources may serve as backups to soften the impact. If you sell physical products, you may want to think about also adding digital ads or affiliate products to your site

You can sometimes even increase your ad revenue by rotating ads from different ad networks every few weeks in order to determine which ones work best for your site. Paid membership programs can be quite profitable too if you have a website with regularly returning visitors. You can’t ask, “How much is my site worth?” until you’ve explored every avenue to figure out how much potential revenue you might be missing out on.

Boost Visitor Traffi

Your visitor traffic is like the blood that runs through the veins of your website. Therefore, it’s crucial to improve traffic, which will almost always positively impact the value of your website. One of the best ways to improve traffic is to focus on improving the percentage of returning visitors to your site.

While gaining new visitors is always great, you’re squandering the potential your current visitors have if you’re not trying to retain them. One excellent way to improve visitor retention is by adding a forum to your website. It keeps your visitors engaged with each other, and as a bonus, it can sometimes improve your SEO as well. If you feel that your site isn’t suitable for a membership forum, you may want to consider adding comment boxes below your content as an alternative.

Another way to keep those visitors coming back is by introducing an email subscription list. You can have your visitors opt-in to receive emails from your site whenever new content is added. There are many different software programs, plug-ins, and services available online that will allow you to do this. When you update anything on your site, you can then send out emails to notify your visitors. While some may not respond, there are always some who will read the email and return to the site. In no time, you’ll be looking back and saying, “Wow, look at how much my website value has increased after visitors came back!”

Improve Brand Recognition

You should never forget that your website can act as a brand to customers and brand recognition is very important for the value of any company. Increasing your social media presence with videos or other multimedia can greatly improve your brand recognition and boost the value of your site.

If you’re having trouble bringing in visitors and don’t have much traffic, you might want to re-evaluate your domain name. Shorter domain names are more memorable and the more relevant they are to your niche, the better. Here is a breakdown of what a URL with domain name looks like: 

Premium domain names that already have existing value can be purchased through domain name auction websites. This can do wonders for your overall brand and value of your site. If you do decide to transfer your site to a new domain name, make sure to do so with 301 redirects. You should speak to your website host if you’re unsure how to do this properly. 

Delegate and Automate

As a website owner, you need to view your site as a business and you need to act as both the owner and the manager. If you were to ask a top manager who works for a Fortune 500 company, “What’s the best way for me to see my website worth improve?” he’d probably know the answer to this question immediately. He wouldn’t need to know anything about web development either. It’s the same answer he’d give to someone who’s asking how to improve a large company’s overall value; Delegate and automate.

If you want to see a boost in your website’s value, you need to delegate tasks to others and automate other tasks when possible. Act as a manager would and have others do some of your work so that you can focus on other areas that need your attention.

Figure out ways to have your users generate on their own so you can focus on more pressing issues to improve your SEO or visitor retention rates. Instead of asking, “How can I write this content for my site?” you can leave that for someone else. You’re the owner, you should instead be asking, “How worth is my website and how do I improve this?” Even if this cuts into some of your profits initially, it will help your site grow more quickly and will dramatically increase its value.

Diib®: Increasing Your Website Worth Today!

After you have begun to take steps to improve your website’s value, you should also make sure that you’re staying updated on world news and new trends. The value of your website also relies on the overall demand for the services, products, or information you’re offering to visitors. Diib® partners with thousands of companies worldwide to improve the worth of their websites. Here are some of the features we’re sure you’ll love:

• Customized Objectives give you simple tasks designed to optimize your website
• Alerts that tell you about your Domain Authority other technical SEO issues
• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
• Post performance reports
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
• User experience and mobile speed optimization

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