How To Check Your Website Value (OMG Is That All?)

If you've ever wondered how to check your website value, have you tried some valuation tool sites that automatically calculate an estimate figure? Unfortunately each tool is set with its own unique algorithm and, they all come up with different valuations based on different areas of performance. It's such a wide range of results that you won't know which one to trust. 

If you are looking to sell your site, there really is only one point to consider in the best interests of a buyer - how much net profit your site is making. Other than that, if you're purely interested to know how well your website is doing, those value calculators can give you a guidance and motivate you to carry on building. So how much is my website worth?

Alexa Ranking - Does It Matter?

Alexa ranking is heavily based on the number of visits and page views. Alexa says due to the limited data availability, the rankings lower than 100,000 are not as accurate, even though they're updated daily.

I've actually witnessed my site ranking positions hugely fluctuated high and low. Over a year ago, after running some ad campaigns (i.e. sending visitors to my site via advertisements) it shot up into the top 300,000. After the campaigns it gradually dropped, and right now it's positioned around 1.3 millionth, although many posts have been published since.

In fact you can easily manipulate the number of daily visitors by sending bot traffic, by using services such as Rebrandable Traffic and Kris Clicks, and it will simply improve the site ranking position in Alexa. So a site that's ranked high in Alexa does not necessarily mean it's valuable, unless it's in the top 100,000. 

Now, most of the website value calculator sites take Alexa ranking position in their algorithm, so you see how unreliable the value they suggest may be!

Website Value Calculators

There are numerous sites that "automatically calculate" your website value in US Dollars, such as;

• MisiteWealth (https://mysitewealth.com)
• Worth Of Web (https://www.worthofweb.com/calculator/)
• YourWebsiteValue.com (https://www.yourwebsitevalue.com) etc.

As you can see from the above image, I tried to find out how much my website was worth by using several valuation sites. The highest estimate I got was for over $94,600, the lowest was $434. Another one gave me $15,737, another one $2,135 and so on...basically the combination of the results didn't give me the slightest clue. 

At least some of them indicate the key factors which can be a little useful to know. The key factors including;

• Age of website
• Domain authority
• Page authority
• Number of backlinks
• Alexa global traffic rank
• PageRank (that's no longer supported by Google)
• Whether listed on Dmoz or not (that's also been closed for over a year)
• Social media following
• Bounce rate
• Page speed
• Mobile speed

Unfortunately none of them clearly says these factors are taken into consideration in calculating website values.

The most puzzling element for me is that many valuation sites display "estimated daily income". They all tell me that my site makes $0.20 - $2 per day (!) Frankly the total of affiliate income I receive from this site is around $2,500 per month right now, i.e. around $83 per day. So this part is hugely underestimated. If I was to sell this site now (I will not just yet!) these valuation sites could make me fend off potential buyers!

Simple Manual Valuation

Many experts emphasize that SEO is the biggest element when considering how to check your website value (surprise!) Otherwise they generally suggest a simple formula of 24-36x the monthly revenue. There's a huge gap between 24 months (double) and 36 months (triple) though.

Forbes suggests that it should be 24 to 36 x monthly revenue, and SEOChat suggests 36x. While Moz.com suggests 20 to 50 x monthly net profit. That makes more sense because expenses cannot be ignored especially for e-commerce or drop-shipping sites. A 'revenue' refers to a turnover, gross income, i.e. before cost of sales and overhead. Imagine someone says to you that he's making $10,000 of monthly 'revenue' and you're looking to buy his site. But he actually spends 80% of it on inventory stock. You wouldn't know the actual net profit if he was selling a mixture of low-margin and high-margin products. So these suggestions are really, not so clear either.

Empire Flippers

EmpireFlippers.com also offers a free valuation but this is more convincing because you need to answer the questions by presenting basic figures, and the questions are tailored by type of business. It won't take you a couple of minutes to answer the questions in the following order;

1. Your main source of income (E-commerce, Affiliate, Amazon Associates, Google Adsense, drop-shipping, subscription service, etc.)
2. How many hours you work a week
3. The date your website started
4. Your average monthly revenue and expense
5. Number of unique visitors
6. Number of email subscribers
7. Number of social media channels and followers

Lastly enter your email address and the valuation figures will be sent to you instantly. The hi-lo figures are based on assumption that you put your site on the market. The result I was given for my site was the lowest of $40k (if I was in a rush to sell), the highest of $122k (if my site had something unique + I was willing to wait), the average valuation of $81k.

More detail is explained in the email. Try this one and see what you can make out of it.