How to prepare your website for sale
Most sites sell for less than they should because the seller starts getting ready the week they list. Here is what to do, in the order that pays.
A website sells on what a buyer can verify, not on what it is worth. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is almost entirely made up of work you could have done in advance. Every hour spent making the figures checkable comes back several times over, because the discount a buyer applies to a claim they cannot test is far larger than most sellers expect.
The order below is deliberate. Do it in this sequence and each step makes the next easier.
Start twelve months before you want to sell
That sounds like a lot. It is not, because the thing that takes twelve months is a clean trailing twelve month record, and you cannot manufacture that later. A buyer prices on the average monthly net profit of the last year. If six of those months are missing, incomplete, or tangled up with another business, they will price on the worst plausible reading of what they cannot see.
If you are reading this and want to sell next month, you can still do most of what follows. You will simply carry a discount that a year of preparation would have removed.
Separate the site from everything else
This is the single biggest avoidable problem we see. The site shares a hosting account with four other projects, the advertising revenue lands in a personal PayPal, the domain is registered to an old email address nobody can access, and the analytics property covers three sites at once. None of that is fatal, and all of it makes the asset look harder to buy than it is.
Give the site its own hosting, its own analytics property, its own revenue account and its own registrar login. A buyer is not only paying for traffic and profit, they are paying for a thing that can be handed over. An asset that cannot be cleanly separated is worth less, and sometimes worth nothing at all because the deal collapses at the transfer stage.
Get the numbers into a form someone else can check
Revenue is not profit, and buyers will work out the difference whether or not you do it for them. Build a simple monthly profit and loss covering at least twelve months: revenue by source, then hosting, domains, tools, content, freelancers and anything else the site genuinely costs. What is left is net profit, and net profit times a multiple is your price.
UK content sites generally trade between 24 and 48 times monthly net profit, clustering around 30 to 40. Where you land depends far less on how much traffic you have than on how defensible it is. A site earning six hundred pounds a month from a diversified mix, with brand search and returning readers, prices near the top. A site earning the same from one informational keyword cluster prices near the bottom, and increasingly below it, because AI answers are taking those queries first. Every sale we complete goes into the public sold price index with its price and multiple, so you can check the band yourself rather than take our word for it.
Do not round anything up. A buyer who catches one optimistic figure will reprice the whole listing, and they are right to.
Make the evidence connectable, not screenshotable
A screenshot proves nothing. Anyone can produce one, the whole category knows it, and a serious buyer treats a screenshot as an assertion rather than evidence. What counts is read access: your Google Analytics property, your Search Console, and whatever account the money lands in. That is the standard every listing here is held to, and how verification works sets out exactly what we check.
Before you list, make sure you can actually grant that access. Check you own the Analytics property rather than sitting inside an agency's account, verify Search Console for the domain, and confirm you can export from your ad network or payment processor. Sellers routinely discover at the worst moment that their analytics belongs to a developer they stopped working with in 2023.
Fix the things a buyer will find anyway
Assume any serious buyer runs your domain through Ahrefs before they speak to you. They will see your backlink profile, your traffic trend and your ranking keywords, so there is no version of this where the weaknesses stay hidden. The only question is whether they hear it from you first. Our own listings publish that data including the unflattering parts, which is why the domain listings carry a disclosure wherever the inherited links turn out to be junk.
Check three things. Whether your backlinks are real, because a large referring domain count built through link schemes is worth nothing and a buyer who spots it will assume the rest of the listing is equally dressed up. Whether your traffic trend is honest, because a decline you disclose costs you a percentage and a decline they discover costs you the sale. And whether your content is thin, because a buyer who plans to keep publishing will read a sample of it.
Write down how the site actually runs
Most sellers underestimate how much of the operation lives in their head. Put it on paper: how content gets produced and published, what it costs, who your freelancers are, which plugins or services the site depends on, what breaks regularly and what you do about it, and roughly how many hours a week the thing takes.
Be honest about the hours. A site that needs fifteen hours a week is a job, and pricing it as though it were passive gets found out in the first serious conversation.
Decide what actually transfers
List it explicitly before anyone asks: the domain, the content and media, the hosting setup, the analytics and Search Console properties, the mailing list, the social accounts, and any advertising or affiliate accounts. Some of those cannot legally transfer, because a number of ad networks and affiliate programmes will not reassign an account. Find out which, and say so in the listing rather than letting it surface during completion.
If it is a .uk domain, the transfer itself is an IPS tag change through Nominet and takes about a day. We are a Nominet registrar, so on anything sold here we do that ourselves rather than sending you instructions.
Offer a handover period. Thirty days of email support is the norm, costs you very little, and removes a real fear for a buyer who has never run a site like yours.
Price it, then justify it
Work out the multiple, apply it to your trailing twelve month average monthly net profit, and write down why that multiple is right. Growing traffic, diversified income, a real brand, low hours and clean records all argue upward. Decline, single-channel dependence, heavy workload and messy books all argue down.
If the number disappoints you, the honest options are to accept it or spend six months fixing whatever is dragging it down. Listing at a price the evidence does not support just means sitting unsold while the traffic ages.
The short version
Separate the asset. Keep twelve clean months. Make the data connectable rather than screenshotable. Find your own weaknesses before a buyer does and disclose them. Write down how it runs. Then price it on evidence and be ready to show your working.
When you are ready, a free valuation takes about two minutes and comes back with the reasoning shown, and selling here costs nothing up front and eight percent on completion.