Creating a website from scratch can take a lot of time, effort, and money. In fact, it is a huge barrier to entry for anyone wanting to start, not just an online business but a business in general.
You need to choose a niche that works for you, learn about your target market, investigate the competitors, and then design a user-friendly, engaging website. That’s not even considering the time and effort required to create a loyal fan base, let alone a sustainable business model.
Nonetheless, there is a way to avoid this problem, and that is to buy an already-established website. However, although there are numerous upsides to working with an existing website, there are also possible downsides to doing so. This is why we will discuss the pros and cons of buying an existing website today.
The Pros of Buying an Existing Website
1. It Removes the Needless Stress of Creating a Website
Making a website successful enough to generate income is a difficult endeavor. Building a website from scratch is an arduous task. It takes a lot of work to build a website: from choosing a domain name and hosting provider to updating and maintaining your site.
This takes time, as well as money. Furthermore, producing high-quality content to attract visitors and finally optimizing for leads, conversions, and sales. As a result, the to-do list for developing a brand-new website might seem extensive and overwhelming.
In addition, you’ll need to put in a lot of time and effort and have a lot of patience to test out different variations of your internet business plan. These preliminary steps, however, will already have been taken care of if you’re purchasing an already-established website. Therefore, if you purchase a website, you’ll have the potential to generate more leads and increase sales and overall income.
2. You Inherited the Website’s Audience and Traffic
If you want your online business strategy to succeed, you need traffic. You can’t expect to make money from a website no one visits? It might take up to two years for a brand-new website to begin to see consistent visitor numbers.
For a new website to gain significant traffic, you need to do extensive search engine optimization (SEO), publish high-quality content, attract visitors, and see positive results from your PPC strategy. However, success is not guaranteed even if you are doing all these things.
On the other hand, this is not the case when purchasing an already-established website. A well-established website doesn’t need as much search engine optimization or marketing to attract new customers.
Having a pre-existing interest in what you have to offer might give you a significant leg up on the competition. This means you can spend less time and energy attracting new users to your site and more time and energy advertising your goods and services to them.
3. You Rank Your Content Much More Easily
Investing in an already popular website might also help your rankings in search engines. Ranking well on the first page of search engine results pages (SERP) is a huge challenge for newly launched websites. A high-ranking authority website doesn’t appear overnight. This is why getting your content to the top might be difficult if you have a new website. Internet search engines place a higher value on the material of established websites, known as “authorities,” than they do on newly created sites.
When your site ranks well in SERPs, people will find it naturally and search for it, bringing in a flood of free, targeted visitors. More potential customers seeing your site means more potential buyers and more sales. The visitors to your site you decide to buy have likely been reading the content for some time and are, therefore, very familiar with it. This makes it much easier to further develop the website in a manner you see fit.
The Cons of Buying an Existing Website
1. It Requires a Lot of Upfront Capital
Successful websites often sell for two to three times their annual profits. If the website keeps growing at its present rate, it will take you two to three years to break even. That’s a lot of uncertainty for some people, and that’s why they’re hesitant to buy established websites.
For others, particularly those with the skills to quickly expand the firm, it’s a chance to see a return on their investment. Therefore, before you consider buying a website, make sure you set your future plans for the website and business in general to define long-term business goals.
Furthermore, there are no guarantees of success with this new website. While this is also the case for starting from scratch, the money you need to pay upfront for an established website is much higher, and you will possibly not have as much control as you would have liked over your website, business, and the results.
2. You Will Inherit All of the Websites Issues
Issues like poor quality content and backlinks, unsatisfactory customer service, and strained relationships with suppliers and other business partners are all things to consider when purchasing an existing website. Do your research to avoid becoming stuck with something that can’t be rectified. Your best chance of success is to educate yourself as much as possible on the subject.
3. Possibility of Losing Money
And the last con on our list of pros and cons of buying an existing website is the risk of losing money. If you acquire a low-performing site with terrible SEO and a bad reputation, you may end up losing a lot of money attempting to fix it.
Furthermore, if the website hasn’t been adequately maintained or updated after the acquisition, search engines may punish it—yet another huge setback for your organization. To top it all off, you won’t know how healthy the website’s traffic is until you buy it.
The worst-case scenario is that you are left with a website with no traffic and a slew of severe flaws that need to be addressed. In such a case, you’d be better off beginning from scratch.
