Before you buy a website: six questions due diligence should answer
Traffic screenshots and revenue spreadsheets are where a site sale starts, not where it should end. Six technical questions to answer before money changes hands.
Buying a content, affiliate or lead-generation site usually starts with a traffic chart and a revenue spreadsheet. Both can be accurate and still mislead. Most of what decides whether the site keeps earning after the sale sits underneath them, in the data and in the code.
These are the questions we would want answered, each with an example from sites we have worked on.
1. How much of the traffic is people?
On one site, 55% of the visits analytics reported were bots. If the price is a multiple of traffic, that difference is the price. Compare analytics with server logs, and look at engagement by network and hour.
2. Which pages actually earn?
Revenue should trace to pages and placements. On one site, the main affiliate banner ran on 298 articles and nobody could say which page earned a click. Without that, you are buying an average, and averages hide the few pages that carry the business.
3. Is the traffic trend explained?
A rising or falling line needs causes with dates. Pull at least a year of search data, not the last 28 days, and put releases and Google updates on the same timeline. A drop nobody can explain will usually keep going.
4. What is automation doing that nobody watches?
We once found a scheduled job deleting articles two days after publishing, including 670 on Google’s first page. Ask for a list of every scheduled task and what it deletes, unpublishes or redirects.
5. How healthy is the structure?
- How many published pages get no visits at all? On one site: 15,587 pages, one visit between them in 25 days.
- How many old addresses forward to the home page? On one site: 21,179.
- How fast do the money pages load on a phone? Up to 5.4 s on one site, against Google’s 2.5 s threshold.
6. What is the security and code risk?
Who has access, what is exposed, which plugins are abandoned, and whether anything can be changed without fear. In one engagement we found and privately reported four security exposures in the first weeks. Better found before closing than after.
How we report it
Every answer labelled proven, likely or unknown, with how we know. A buyer can price “unknown”. What hurts is a guess presented as a fact.
The examples in this article come from real engagements. Client details withheld; every figure comes from the client’s own data.
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