The Preliminary Website Once-Over

The famous once-over of a website is how you’re going to cut your time commitment down drastically by making quick decisions about many different websites — so let’s make sure you master this part! This is the process of looking at a website, making sure it fits within our loose guidelines preliminarily, and then taking a second to think about the website logically.

If the website meets your loose standards here, you can then commit to spending 10-15 minutes performing a deeper due-diligence dive on the website.

Fortunately, for many marketplaces, like Flippa, you’re able to filter out several of the main dealbreakers, including the type of website, website age, country, and price. This leaves you with just a couple of other things that you need to take note of.

By clicking into the listing, you’re most likely going to be getting a graph showing the revenue and traffic growth over the past 6-12+ months. Of course, you’ll want to make sure that this graph is increasing or is at the very least steady. You don’t want to purchase a dying asset obviously!

You can also pop the domain into Ahrefs.com to get a nice breakdown of traffic and keyword growth along with a backlink profile!

A couple of seconds on the backlink list page will allow you to see the amount/type of backlinks and the domain rating — letting you know if you’re about to dive into an authoritative site or not.

Then, check out the website for yourself. Check for the speed of the website, because if it’s slow, that’s going to be a massive quick win that we can make.

When you’re in the website, take a look at the content and determine if it’s natural, readable, and something that Google will not be punishing anytime soon.

You can also look at the topics being discussed and think about some obvious monetization methods and areas where you can expand the content.

If at this point your website has checked all of these boxes, you’re good to spend the time to dive deep into the website and its listing and determine if it’s worth bidding on!