Best Website Worth Calculator: Case Study of Real Websites

A website worth calculator is a free online tool that takes an existing site and estimates how much that website would be worth. In theory, that could make them perfect tools for evaluating the potential of new niche sites, making an offer on existing sites, or understanding the amount of work required in a niche.

Do they hold up as good tools, or do they fall short? 

I’ve tested three of the most popular website worth calculators to find out which ones work, which don’t, and to figure out whether they’re worth using or not.

Let’s get into it!

How We Tested The Calculators…

I tested the various tools using my outdoor case study site as the guinea pig. Here are the actual numbers and true valuation of the websites:

1. Last 30 days page views: 62,161
2. Last 12-months page views: 880,564
3. Average page views/mo: 73,380
4. Average revenue/mo: $3,946

To estimate your website’s worth, you need to use this simple formula:

Website Valuation ($) = Last-6-month’s profit (L6M) x Monthly Multiple (MM)

The valuation multiplier for this content site is 35X to 42X monthly multiple. This equates to $138,110 to $165,732 valuation. Our goal is to put the outdoor site URL through the various website worth calculators on the web to see how they value a website.

Note that these tools will only generate estimates. They are using publicly available data to generate a valuation. It will be wrong. 

In this article, my goal is to showcase which one is more accurate and then provide ways you can estimate valuations yourself.

Let’s get into it!

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Analysis of the Best Website Worth Calculators

Time to dive into the numbers. When looking for the best website worth calculator three names consistently came up: 

1. Worth of Web
2. SitePrice
3. My Website Worth Checker

Those are the three we’ll test against the niche site I’m using for the case study.

1. Worth of Web Review Review

Worth of Web explains their calculator uses public data to estimate traffic and the earnings of ads/affiliate sales that would come from that level of traffic. Alexa Traffic Rank is the tool used to estimate online traffic, while the exact method of estimating revenue numbers remains in-house but almost certainly comes from a fairly basic mathematical algorithm.

With those estimates, they give an estimated worth based on daily, monthly, and annual numbers for revenue.

You can read their in-depth explanation here if you want to know more.

I plugged in the numbers and Worth of Web came back with the following:

Estimating The Case Study Site

• Website worth: $18,701
• Revenue per day: $59
• Revenue per month: $1,770
• Revenue per year: $21,240
• Pageviews per day: 19,748
• Pagevews per month: 592,440

What’s interesting is that although many of these numbers are way off, they are closer to the truth than SitePrice or My Website Worth Checker managed to get. 

The revenue per month is a touch under half of what is actually earned. The page views per day – I wish the site received that much traffic! Huge overestimation pulled from Alexa Traffic Rank. 

The estimated website worth caught my eye: it was only a 10.5-month multiplier even by their own estimated income numbers.

Pros

• Best website worth calculator out of the three reviewed
• Closest to estimated revenue – might be closer to being in the right area for a site that isn’t monetized by a professional who knows what they’re doing

Cons

• Wildly over-optimistic on the traffic numbers
• The estimated website worth shows they have no idea of how website worth is determined by the market
• Site estimate wildly undervalues what the site is worth
• Traffic estimate tools are notoriously wrong/inconsistent but Alexa Traffic Rank isn’t considered one of the best tools by anyone

2. SitePrice Review

SitePrice uses public data along with a series of other factors to determine their estimate of the website value. Some of these make sense like domain age, daily page views, and estimated revenue but many do not. 

The attempt is to build an algorithm that isn’t just based on traffic numbers but also takes other mitigating or “SEO factors” together for what they hope is a more accurate value estimate.

You can read more about what factors SitePrice considers when coming up with an estimate here (just scroll down the page).

So how did SitePrice’s analysis come out?

Estimating The Case Study Site

• Website worth: $5,603
• Revenue per day: $2.21
• Revenue per month: $66
• Revenue per year: $796
• Pageviews per day: 1,105

SitePrice didn’t think too much of my niche site. Traffic numbers were only half of what I was getting – and the revenue estimates were terrible. Their estimates for the site’s monthly income is what it makes in 12 hours on an average day.

Almost all the numbers on this website worth calculator just seemed low. A look at what is used in the algorithm makes it easy to see why. It talks about things like PageRank, which ceased being a publicly available metric in 2016!

Pros

• The page views per day was relatively close, at least in comparison to other website worth calculators
• They are very open about what factors go into their specific algorithm to come up with the estimated value numbers

Cons

• Badly outdated standards such as using Google AdSense for revenue estimates or using Bing and Yahoo indexing as value factors
• Way off on both traffic numbers and revenue numbers
• Does not appear to have been updated in many years – but the website markets have changed a lot since then
• Reading what the calculator shows that this tool uses some outdated metrics in their analysis
• Valuation, even by their own numbers, shows they don’t understand how websites are valued and sold

3. My Website Worth Checker Review

My Website Worth Checker gets props for being easy. Type in a domain name, hit enter, and it does the rest. 

The calculator’s algorithm is mainly based on Alexa’s traffic estimates, but it also looks at other sources like Compete and AdSense to get a fuller number.

You can read more about how the My Website Worth Checker works here.

Estimating The Case Study Site

• Website worth: $1,534
• Revenue per day: $14
• Revenue per month: $430
• Revenue per year: $5,160
• Pageviews per day: 7,519
• Pageviews per month: 225,570

This is another example of an online website value calculator that overestimated the traffic numbers by quite a bit and vastly underestimated the income numbers. They had my site getting over 3x the daily traffic but with a fraction of the daily revenue.

Even by their numbers, they have the website’s total worth of fewer than four months’ worth of revenue. That is well short of the multiplier anyone should expect in today’s website market.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Well-organized section clearly outlining what goes into their estimation algorithm

Cons

• Uses AdSense as a primary form of monetization for their estimates
• Revenue numbers are way off
• Traffic numbers are again way off
• The meager worth shows this calculator doesn’t remotely understand website valuation on the open market

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Why Don’t Website Worth Calculators Work?

At this point, there should be a prominent theme: the website worth calculators just don’t work. Why is this?

1. They use third-party traffic tools like Alexa
2. They don’t factor in revenue streams properly
3. They don’t use proper valuation methodologies

These three factors make it virtually impossible for any of the well-known website calculators to get accurate estimates.

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2 Alternate (Better) Ways to Estimate Your Website’s Worth

If website worth calculators aren’t effective, what tools or methods are available to estimate a website’s worth more accurately?

Alternative #1: The Website Flip Valuation Calculator

I wasn’t happy with just how far off any of these website worth calculators were. So I created one based on my over a decade of knowledge website flipping!

You can find the methodology behind doing a proper website valuation here.

How much of a difference does it make when someone who understands website valuation in a current market creates a calculator? Let’s run the case study site to find out.

Estimating The Outdoor Case Study Site

I typed in the numbers for the case study as follows:

• Aged of website: older than 1 year
• Average profit per month: $3,946
• Monetization sources: Affiliate, Amazon Affiliate, Display Ads
• Major traffic source: Organic Search

The estimated valuation came out to $138,110 to $151,921

Being able to input how a site is monetized, its age, traffic type, and putting in the average profit per month means an accurate look at what a site could be worth.

Pros

• Made by a professional website flipper who understands the actual valuation of websites
• Only website value calculator that allows users to customize monetization sources for more accurate estimates
• Using monthly profit versus traffic numbers means more accurate estimates
• Allows website owners to tweak inputs to see how that affects the overall potential value
• Only calculator that nailed the valuation of my niche site case study

Cons

• Since the average profit per month needs to be known this is better for estimating the value of sites you control versus predicting what a hypothetical X site in Y niche might earn

Alternative #2: Manually Using AHREFs or SEMRush

If you have the information available, you can manually figure out a pretty accurate website worth estimating using better tools like AHREFs or SEMRush. These aren’t entirely accurate, but they are far more accurate than Alexa Traffic.

1. Obtain the monthly organic traffic estimate

Get the numbers from one of these tools. I think AHREFs tend to be a bit closer to reality than SEMRush, but both will be different from reality in most cases.

2. Use an industry-standard Revenue Per 1,000 visitor estimate (RPM)

Estimating the RPM is the most challenging part since it depends on how the site owner monetizes. It also needs to consider all types of monetization from display ads, affiliates, digital products, and more.

Using an industry-average RPM is the best way to go. If you can look at a site and see who is providing the ads or use Amazon links, you can tweak the average RPM a bit, but this is still an educated guess.

3. Calculate Monthly Revenue

Once you have an estimate of the RPM, apply this formula:

Monthly Revenue ($) = RPM x (Monthly Traffic / 1000)

This will give you the monthly revenue.

4. Calculation Valuation

Once you know the revenue, you can apply the valuation calculation as follows:

Website Valuation ($) = Monthly Revenue ($) x Monthly Multiple (MM)

This is the estimate for how much the website is worth.

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FAQs about Website Worth Calculators

Here are the most common questions about website worth calculators.

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Takeaways

While the idea of a website worth calculator is certainly appealing, the options out there were frankly terrible. So much so that rather than recommend one, I made my own to fill the gap.

1. Most online website worth calculators are wrong in traffic, earnings, and valuation
2. Most online website value calculators are very outdated
3. The calculator I developed was specifically to offer the first website worth calculator that understands valuation and gives the user options to customize an estimate

Make sure to learn the mathematical formulas needed. You can get much more accurate estimates than the previous “top three” website worth calculators can provide.