Staff

While this may not be relevant for most websites, some higher-end properties may come with staff connected to them.

These staff members can come in all shapes and sizes, including part-time, full-time, or contractors performing writing, editing, maintenance, design, coding, or any other website functions.

You should be aware of exactly who these employees are and what they’re doing for the website, which is fortunately almost always disclosed by the seller.

With these employees, you’ll first want to know if they’re actually being passed to you with the ownership of the website. A website owner may be using this staff for all of their projects, and they’ll stick with the seller once the transaction is made, leaving you without the right people for the job.

If there are staff, but they aren’t coming with the website, you’ll need to get a detailed report of what the staff did so that you can figure out how to either do their work yourself or hire your own staff to replace them.

If staff is coming with the website, you’ll basically want the same info — what they do and how they can continue doing their job with you.

It’s also an important principle to consider how much the staff costs vs what they bring in to the website.

For example, it’s fairly common for a website to have a contracted writer that writes content for it. If the website owner has been spending $500/month on this writer, but it turns out that their content is not bringing in enough traffic to offset this cost (given enough time for the content to rank, of course), then you’d probably consider cutting the employee.

If staff is essential for running the website can’t be cut, make sure that it still makes economic sense. Otherwise, you may want to pass on the website.

Fortunately, you probably won’t come across websites with staff, so this won’t be a worry for you.