Buying a website checklist: due diligence, red flags and transfer (2026)

Before you look at listings: pick the venue

Where you buy decides how much checking has already been done for you. None of these venues guarantees a business, so the checklist below applies everywhere. What changes is the starting point.

Two of these deposits are final. Motion Invest’s $1,000 deposit is non-refundable (“Once it’s paid, the site is yours”), and Empire Flippers calls its Buy Now deposit non-refundable. Do the checks below before you pay either one.

The due diligence checklist

1. Income

• Ask for 12 months or more of monthly profit and loss, then check each income line against the source: the affiliate dashboard, ad network, payment processor or app store.
• Use screen sharing or read-only access, not screenshots. Watch the seller log in.
• Confirm each income account can move to you, or that you can join the same program under your own name.
• Match the dates. A good month right before listing is worth a question.

2. Traffic

• Look at at least 12 months in the analytics account and Google Search Console. Look for sudden drops.
• Check where visits come from. Motion Invest, for example, only takes sites with about 80%+ organic traffic spread across many pages, because traffic from one or two pages is fragile.
• Ask about any paid traffic, penalties or redirected domains. Empire Flippers rejects businesses that show signs of manipulation such as penalties, deleted accounts or 301 redirects.

3. Costs

• List every cost: hosting, the domain, email, writers, tools, paid plugins and apps. Profit is income minus all of them.
• Check renewal prices, not intro prices. Bluehost Starter, for example, is $3.99 a month on a 36-month term ($143.64), but the next 36 months renew at $9.99 a month ($359.64). If the seller’s profit figure uses the intro price, your costs will be higher.
• Ask which costs the seller’s own time covers. If they write every post themselves, you need to budget for a writer.

4. What is included

• The domain, all content and media, the email list, social accounts, supplier and affiliate accounts, software licenses and any trademarks.
• Who owns the content: was it written by the seller, by freelancers or by AI tools, and are the photos and fonts licensed? See who owns your website.
• Whether the domain name itself might conflict with someone’s trademark. A domain identical or confusingly similar to a known mark can be lost in a dispute.

5. How it moves

• Which platform, which host and which registrar. Who does the migration, and by when.
• Write the full list of what must be handed over into the purchase agreement. That list is what “delivered” means when you decide whether to release the money.

6. Questions to ask the seller

• Why are you selling, and what would you do next if you kept it?
• How many hours a week does it take, and on what?
• Has income or traffic dropped in the last two years, and what did you change?
• Which accounts are in your personal name, and which are shared with other sites?
• Will you help after the handover, for how long, and is that in writing?
• Will you agree not to start a competing site? (In an asset sale, that promise is one of the assets listed on Form 8594.)

Keep every answer in writing, on the platform’s messaging where there is one. If an answer changes later, that is a reason to slow down.

Red flags

• The seller wants to be paid directly, outside the platform. Flippa’s Terms ban payments outside the platform, and you lose the escrow.
• Earnings mixed with the seller’s other sites. Motion Invest turns these down because the income can’t be proven.
• Traffic falling over the last few months, or coming from a handful of pages.
• Customer numbers that can’t be verified. Acquire.com names this as a common reason it rejects listings.
• Pressure to skip the inspection period or release funds early.
• Income claims with no dates or proof. The FTC’s Business Opportunity Rule requires written proof for earnings claims in the deals it covers (and dates for claims in ads), but whether it covers the sale of an existing website depends on its three-part definition, and the FTC’s guide has no website example. Ask for proof either way.

Escrow: how your money is protected

Escrow means a third party holds your payment until you confirm you received what you bought. On Escrow.com, the buyer pays in, the seller transfers the site, and the buyer inspects it for an agreed 1 to 30 days, according to its inspection-period FAQ.

Escrow.com’s fee calculator shows the standard fee by price: 2.6% up to $5,000 (minimum $50), 2.4% from $5,000.01 to $50,000 and 1.9% from $50,000.01 to $200,000. That is $240 on a $10,000 purchase, $1,200 on $50,000 and $1,900 on $100,000. Card and PayPal add 3.05% and only work up to $5,000, and buyers outside the US who pay by international wire add $25. Buyer and seller agree who pays the fee.

Escrow.com’s US company says it holds “a combination of escrow and money services business licenses”, listed state by state on its licenses page. Empire Flippers and Motion Invest hold funds themselves instead, so you rely on the broker rather than an independent escrow company.

Transfer by platform

A site built on a closed builder changes owners inside that builder. Self-hosted WordPress moves as files. Check the platform’s own process before you agree a timeline. Scores are from our exit scores.

• Shopify (exit score 5/10). Settings > General > Transfer store > Manage, then choose a new owner outside your business; the new owner accepts by email. A store can’t be transferred while Shopify Capital or Shopify Credit is in use, Shopify Balance must be emptied first, and payouts and tax details must be updated after. Shopify’s help article.
• Self-hosted WordPress (10/10). Back up files and database, copy them to your host, and edit wp-config.php if the database details change. WordPress’s handbook warns that a whole-database search and replace can break serialized data, so use a proper search-replace tool.
• WordPress.com (8/10). Only the site owner can transfer it, from Hosting Dashboard > Settings, confirmed by email. The plan, upgrades and domains move to you; you then update the domain contacts.
• Wix (3/10). Site Actions > Transfer site; you have 3 days to accept. Digital download files, purchased logos and a few other items don’t transfer.
• Squarespace (5/10). The owner invites you as a contributor, then transfers ownership. Subscriptions and attached Squarespace domains move; parked domains move separately.
• Webflow (6/10). Transfer from Site settings to your Workspace. A site with a paid Site plan can be sent only from a Freelancer or Agency Workspace. Ecommerce plans don’t transfer, and integrations, form notifications and billing reset.
• The domain. If you use the same registrar as the seller, an account-to-account push is simplest. At Namecheap it is free, has no 60-day wait, keeps DNS so there is no downtime, can’t be undone, and must be accepted within 7 days. Otherwise follow how to transfer a domain.

Test before you release the money. Agree a short test list in writing: the site loads from your own hosting account, every page and image is there, contact forms send email to you, analytics records visits, affiliate and ad income is credited to your accounts, and the domain shows you as the owner with auto-renew on. Only mark the purchase accepted, or let a broker release funds, once each line is done.

More on handovers in moving your website.

The 3-year cost of owning what you buy

Budget for running costs as part of the price. On our site-wide baseline, a small WordPress site costs $432.60 over three years: Bluehost Starter at $3.99 a month on a 36-month term ($143.64, renewing at $9.99 a month), $36.96 in domain renewals and $252 for one Google Workspace inbox. A Squarespace Core or Wix Core site is $1,332.96 on the same baseline. Writers, tools and ads come on top.

Paperwork after closing

This is general information, not tax or legal advice. In the US, the IRS says both the buyer and the seller of a group of business assets generally file Form 8594 (Asset Acquisition Statement) when goodwill could attach, which is common in a website purchase. How you split the price across asset classes affects both sides, so agree it in the purchase agreement and talk to an accountant. Our guide to selling a website explains the form in more detail.

What to do next

1. Check what a fair price looks like in our website valuation guide.
2. Compare venues on the buy and sell websites hub.
3. Read the platform’s transfer article before you make an offer.