Answers
How do you check how many hours a website for sale really takes to run?
Short answer: Ask the seller to list every recurring task, how often it happens and how long it takes, then check that list against the inbox, the publishing history and any contractor invoices. Put a market price on every hour the owner works, including hours they call 'just checking in', and take that cost off the profit before you apply a multiple.
Why do the hours matter?
Most small listings quote profit before paying anyone to do the owner's work. If you will not do that work yourself, you will pay someone to do it, and that cost comes straight off the profit you are paying a multiple for. A listing that says "2 hours a week" when the real figure is 15 changes the price a lot. See SDE vs net profit.
What should you ask the seller for?
- A task list: every recurring job, how often it happens, how long it takes and who does it. Include support, publishing, supplier orders, ad changes, bookkeeping and fixing things that break.
- The support inbox volume: tickets or emails a month and the average time spent on each.
- Contractor and freelancer invoices for the last 12 months, and whether those people will stay after the sale.
- A normal week and a bad week: what happened the last time something went wrong and how long it took to fix.
How do you check the answers?
- Compare the task list to the evidence. Publishing dates, order counts and support threads show how much work actually happens. Twenty new articles a month do not take two hours a week.
- Look for unpaid help. Family members, a co-founder or an unpaid assistant often do work that never shows up as a cost.
- Watch a handover week. Ask to shadow the seller for a few days before closing, or write it into the handover terms; see how long the handover should be.
What are the red flags?
- No hours stated at all, or "passive" and "fully automated" with no task list behind it.
- Hours that do not fit the output, such as daily publishing or hundreds of orders a month on a few hours a week.
- Skills only the owner has, such as writing in a niche, editing video or keeping custom code running.
- Contractors paid outside the business, so their cost is missing from the profit figure.
What does a composite check look like?
This is a composite example, not a real deal. A content site lists $3,000 a month in profit, "about 3 hours a week", asking $90,000. The publishing history shows 12 new articles a month, which the seller writes. At a market rate of about $100 an article plus 4 hours a month of updates and email at $30 an hour, the real labour cost is about $1,300 a month. The buyer restates profit at about $1,700 a month and offers about $55,000, or a higher price only with an earnout tied to the content staying on schedule.
Run the listing through the free red-flag checker; it flags listings that do not state owner hours or that call a business passive while relying on staff.
Frequently asked questions
What rate should I put on the owner's time?
Use what it would cost to hire someone to do each task, not your own salary. Writing, support and bookkeeping each have their own market rates.
What if I plan to do the work myself?
Still price it. Your time has a cost, and if you later hire help the profit will fall to the restated figure anyway.
How many hours is too many for a small website?
There is no single number. What matters is whether the profit still makes sense after you pay for those hours. Our checker flags owners working more than 10 hours a week as a prompt to check.
Sources
- FirstPass Memo, red-flag checker rules, our own rules, published as /rules.json
- FirstPass Memo, seller question bank, October 2026 (general checklist), our own questions
- FirstPass Memo, free buyer calculators, our own calculators; the formulas are on each page
Related
- Free red-flag checker
- Questions to ask before buying a website
- SDE vs net profit
- Add-backs when buying a website
- How long the handover should be
- Red flags when buying an online business
- Red flag: owner hours not stated
- Red flag: called passive but relies on staff
- Glossary of listing terms
- More questions buyers ask
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Composite examples are invented and labelled. Figures from other sites are quoted with a link and the date we read them; FirstPass figures are asking prices and seller-stated profit, not sale prices. Informational screening only, not investment, legal or tax advice.