A Guide To Buying and Selling WordPress Sites

Last updated on: November 7, 2023

While there might be a good bit of satisfaction and accomplishment connected to starting your own website, one simply can not neglect the opportunity to buy an established WordPress site, or even sell one that you built yourself.

It’s actually rather easy to buy or sell a website. We’ll show you just where to do it, but first, we need to answer a few critical questions.

Why Buy A WordPress Site?

It might seem like the easy way out, some sort of growth hack that you’d read about on reddit, or just a cheat when it comes to business, but buying an already established website is all too normal these days.

There are dozens of great reasons to purchase a WordPress site rather than build one from scratch. Ultimately it comes down to just a few universal wins.

Building the framework for a site isn’t for everyone
Gaining traction on search engine takes time
Running a successful business requires speed

Building a Well Run Site Takes Effort

If you’ve ever bought a domain, set up hosting, and jumped into WordPress with a blank slate, you know just how rough those first few weeks can be.

You’ll need to develop logos and color schemes. You’ll have to choose a template that works for exactly what you’re trying to achieve and then customize it for success. Each page will need to be carefully thought out, planned, and implemented.

Certainly, you can start a site using WordPress in a matter of minutes, but that site is not going to be very dynamic, attractive, or appealing to an audience of readers.

Purchasing an already existing site takes all of this design work out of the process. Sure, you might want to change a few things. Maybe update the fonts, pick some different stock images, delete a page or add another. But rather than starting to build a home on a piece of land in the middle of the forest, you’re starting with a house that just needs a fresh coat of paint.

SEO Takes Time

Organic traffic is the greatest aspect that any website could possibly have. There are dozens of plugins available specifically to help drive SEO, allowing your website to rank highly on Google, Bing, or any other search engine.

But even with these helpful SEO tools, SEO takes time to build. Obtaining quality backlinks for your published articles can’t happen overnight. If you have fantastic content, it is bound to happen, but even if you’ve written the greatest articles ever conceived, it can take months or even years for enough readers to share your articles in order to begin rising in the ranks.

When purchasing an established WordPress site, you can keep a fine tuned search for just those sites that are already ranking for keywords that are specific to your business or your intended audience. You can define an age range, an SEMrush authority score, or really anything you can imagine in order to seek out the perfect website to purchase and make your own.

Purchase a Complimentary Site

Business today moves swiftly. If you aren’t growing, you’re dying.

It’s highly likely that your competition is already ahead of the game, or at least doing their best to get there.

If you run a business and you’re trying to grow your web presence, starting from scratch will leave you just as far behind as you already are. Or if you’re already ahead, it will allow your competitors a chance to catch up.

Purchasing a website gives you instant rankings and instant customer contacts and retargeting opportunities. Rather than needing to publish 100 articles, you’ve already got them. You just need to sift through and scrub them up a bit.

Why Would I Sell My WordPress Site?

How To Buy or Sell Your WordPress Site with Flippa

This is likely the question that comes up a bit more often than why you might buy a site.

Afterall, there are so many obvious benefits to purchasing an established site, that it would seem nearly insane for someone to want to give up an established site that they spent so much time building and maintaining.

When it comes to selling a site, which can really be thought of as selling a business, everyone has their own reasons and their own timing. The most typical response when asked about the right time to sell a website? “You’ll know it when the time is right.”

There are three typical responses that are heard on marketplaces such as Flippa when it comes to reasons for making a sale:

The owner needs money up front for a larger investment
They’re overloaded with other projects
The owner has lost interest

Selling A WordPress Site To Invest Elsewhere

Serial entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for the next great idea. Sometimes, those ideas cost money.

If you have a WordPress site that is generating a few hundred, or even a tens of thousands of dollars every month, that doesn’t help if you need a large down payment right away for a new house or to invest in a new company.

The average content or eCommerce business, often built on WordPress, can sell from anywhere between a 1.5x to over 6x annual net profit multiple, averaging at about 2.4x on the open market. This means that if your website is earning $1,000 each month in profit, you can likely sell it for around $24,000 or perhaps more if it’s truly something special, giving you money to invest elsewhere right away.

Sometimes it can be hard to understand why anyone would give up a steady revenue stream for a couple years worth of income, but if the investment opportunity is right, this is a very common approach to doing business.

There Is No Such Thing As Passive Income

The term “passive income” is tossed around with far too much abandon. Sure, a website can run on autopilot and make a few dollars via Adsense revenue or some affiliate sales, but anyone with experience knows that if you leave a site to run itself, the profit will continually decline month after month.

Those who run multiple websites, or are running their website as a side hustle while their daylight hours are occupied by a corporate or labor intensive job, can often find themselves in the predicament where they just don’t have the time to keep things running anymore. Or, perhaps, their other business is more lucrative and it doesn’t make sense to spend time on the lesser website.

It’s often better to sell the site off and watch from the sidelines as someone else grows it to peak potential rather than watch it die in your own hands.

Lose Interest, But Don’t Lose Capital

It happens to us all. We start a project and dedicate ourselves to it for months or years of our life. We grow our website to excellence. It dominates the first page of Google search. The money is coming in.

And then…for whatever reason…we lose interest.

But that is no reason to lose capital.

If you lose interest in your website, or just don’t find the time in your schedule to keep it up to date, the best thing to do is sell it while it’s still on top of the charts. This is when it is worth the most to a prospective buyer.

Rather than forget about it and watch the monthly page views and overall revenue sink lower and lower, sell it. Selling your site to a new owner can set you up with a nice bit of spending cash to apply towards whatever it is that is captivating your interest at that moment.

How To Buy or Sell Your WordPress Site

Oddly enough, it’s often easier to explain how to buy or sell a WordPress site than it is to explain why you should do so.

In short, we recommend using Flippa.

If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you’ve never heard of Flippa. But their online marketplace has actually been around for over a decade and it’s by far the easiest place to buy or sell an online business (like your website).

There, of course, are a few competitors to Flippa. However there are a number of reasons why Flippa has them beat. In a nutshell, it comes down to the fact that

They have the largest customer base of users looking to buy a website
The largest catalog of websites that are currently for sale
The best pricing across the board
And simply put, it’s easy to use

A Few Tips For Sellers

As a peer to peer marketplace, their website allows you to list your website with ease, hoisting it into the spotlight of thousands of eager buyers. Opposed to many website brokers, Flippa doesn’t cherry pick the largest, most profitable sites. In fact, there are thousands of examples of small, niche websites driving quick sales success on their platform. Just look at this site, powered by affiliate sales, dedicated specifically to gaming keyboards that sold in just 7 days for $12,500. Or alternatively, this site that is all about outdoor furniture that sold for $138,000.

Flippa Website Valuation Tool

If you aren’t even sure what your website might be worth, we recommend using their built in valuation tool that can give you an estimate in a matter of minutes.

There is plenty of information available around the web on best practices when selling your website. These are just a few quick tips to get you safely on your way.

Be sure to spend time building a quality listing. If you can’t be bothered putting in the effort, why would someone consider purchasing a business from you? Consider it like selling a house. You’ll get a lot more interest if you sweep the floor and paint the walls before people walk through. Make it attractive and show people all of the benefits that you’ve built.
Be communicative. People will ask questions. Sure, they might not proceed with a purchase, but you never know. When people start chatting with you, be sure to respond in a timely manner with as much information as possible.
Collect your things. Be prepared for a transition. Mark down and routines in a document for the next owner to follow. Gather your passwords, logins, art files, whatever it may be in a folder so that you can easily hand them over.
Take your time. It can be easy to become frustrated after a few days if you aren’t getting any attention, but selling a business is different from selling a pair of socks. The average site takes a bit over 3 months to sell. Don’t get unsettled if things seem to move slow.

A Few Tips For Buyers

As a potential buyer, life is equally easy. Just head on over and start browsing all of the WordPress sites that are currently available and see what tickles your fancy. Just use their search toggles to set your budget or any other data points that are important to you.

There are literally thousands of websites for sale on any given day and there are more being listed all of the time. So if you aren’t in love today, fall in love tomorrow. You might even want to sign up for Flippa’s daily email as they highlight some of the best listings each day.