The importance of readability and what is a good website readability score

Website readability score infographic

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What is readability?

Readability measures how easy it is to understand the content and how long it takes for an average person to read it.

To check the readability of a text, you need to analyse the style, the grammar, the structure of the text, and more. While it seems like a big feat, using the right tools will quickly teach you how to write a readable copy.

Our readability score checker suggestions – the best free tools

As a starting point, we would recommend using one of these tools to test the readability of a website:

• ProWritingAid (run the “Readability” report; the tool is free for text up to 500 words)
• Web FX readability test tool
• Readable.com

If you’re on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin gives you the readability score in its free version. And if you’re less of a “cloud person”, Microsoft Word has a built-in readability checker that most people aren’t aware of.

The importance of readability

People always want to find the right information as fast as possible. When using the Internet, they have short attention spans. Pair that with the fact that written language is more complex than spoken and that reading from a screen usually takes longer than reading a print text, and we have a deadly combination.

There’s a common misconception that a readable text is “basic”, or that it’s aimed at young people of school age. A readability score is not a benchmark of your knowledge or sophistication. The purpose is simplify the user experience. Even if your highly educated audience can read a harder piece of content, it will take longer for them to do so. Regardless of your niche, improving readability is crucial.

What’s a good readability score?

We gave you the tools and the reasoning – so now when is your text considered “readable”? Our rule of thumb for web copy is a Flesch Reading Ease of 60 or more, on a scale of up to 100. As a fun fact, the Flesch scale has no lower limit. Yes, we’ve seen text go into negative values!

To give you a general idea of how easy it is to read the text based on its score, here’s how each style is described:

• under 30 is very difficult to read
• 30-50 is difficult
• 50-60 is fairly difficult
• 60-70 is standard
• 70-80 is fairly easy
• 80-90 is easy
• 90-100 is very easy

For context, an 11-year old will easily understand text that scores over 90. People aged 13 to 15 can usually understand anything above 60, and scores under 30 are best understood by university graduates.

How to improve readability

Have you seen this alert before and wondered what to do to improve readability?

The best part about readability is its simple formula. You don’t need any tools to improve your copy. We’d still advise using the aforementioned readability checkers to verify, but here’s everything you need to know about the formula:

So in essence, you only need to do two things to create readable content:

• reduce the number of words per sentence
• use words with fewer syllables

Why creative writing is killing your website

7 tips to improve readability of your content

Readability is important, but it’s not the ultimate solution to your problems. Here are other tips that will improve your writing:

1. Use fewer adverbs. You can use a stronger verb instead, and it will help you reduce the word count in sentences.
2. Avoid passive voice. If you try rephrasing active sentences into passive ones, you’ll see that they usually use more words. By now, you know what’s the result of that. On top of that, passive voice requires more “brainpower”, as the structure of the sentences is complex.
3. Forget long subordinate clauses.
4. Don’t use sticky sentences. Glue words are the most common English words, such as: in, on, the, was, for, that, like, some, from, and more. Yes, you’ve guessed it. A sticky sentence is longer.
5. Consider sentence variety. We’re talking a lot about length, but short sentences aren’t the sweet spot. It would be hard to read paragraphs full of 5-word sentences. Variety keeps the text flowing. Don’t forget that the Reading Ease score has two components. The other one checks the ratio of syllables per word. Longer sentences with fewer syllables can be more readable than short ones.
6. Careful with your scissors. You don’t need to cut every single adverb or aim for super short sentences. There are various preferences based on the source, but usually, the target average sentence length is 11-18 words. The British Government has fantastic guidelines for their writers.
7. Don’t flatter your audience. We’ve mentioned that simplicity doesn’t discredit your visitors’ ability to understand it. The point is to simplify their life. An average person reads at most 28% of the words on a page anyway, so what’s the point?

Good readability improves accessibility

In our article about the top accessibility tips for website editors, readability is one of the key points. Making the content easier to read benefits people with various disabilities. It even goes as far as benefiting the vision-impaired members of your audience. Copy that is easier to read will also be read out faster by screen readers. When you cut the fluff, everyone wins.

How important is readability for SEO?

We’ve mentioned that written language takes more effort to understand than spoken. In short, it’s more natural. As you may know, SEO has long evolved from being an algorithm obsessed with keyword stuffing. It’s all about the users now. And the thing is – people don’t search like machines. They use natural phrases and in 2017 Google confirmed that 15% of daily searches have never been seen before.

So the bottom line is to keep it natural. People search using simple, readable queries and they will appreciate it if the answers follow suit. Of course, there is time and place for everything – but aligning your content with the user expectations is the best direction you can take. It can also future-proof your business, as natural language will help you rank for the keywords frequently asked via voice search. That’s a rather nice side effect, don’t you think?

So what’s the average readability score on your website? Drop the number in the comments and let’s work from there.

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