Increase The Readability Score of Your WordPress Website

The process of a WordPress website development implies a lot of communication with your potential audience by means of various texts. Lots of guides aim to teach how to draw and keep website visitor`s attention but only a few of them pay attention to the question of text readability. In other words, text readability is mostly underestimated.

Readability score is a measurable indicator of the success of your texts. This score shows you how easy or how difficult is it for your website visitors to understand what you say within your texts. The problem is that usually we can not estimate the difficulty level of a text written by ourselves. In this case modern WordPress tools can be very handy and do the analytics on an automated level, displaying tips on simplifying a text right inside your WordPress dashboard.

We will look at the term of readability score closer and learn how to use this knowledge for the sake of a WordPress project. Otherworldly, all you need to know about readability score is in the article below.

How to Measure Readability Score?

Readability itself depends not only on a certain text but also on a reader. The level of difficulty during the reading is determined by a person`s age, education, social conditions and lots of other factors. The term of readability score shows exactly what type of audience will feel itself comfortable while reading your text. For example, Wikipedia offers a very descriptive way of readability`s definition.

The formula you see refers to Flesch-Kincaid readability score, which uses a 1-100 scale. The more score you get within this scale — the easier is your text to read. Although the readability score is far more complicated than only one formula (even though it uses a lot of arguments). Other important things you should consider are:

• sentence length — both too short and too long are considered as a downside for your text
• scanability — the length of paragraphs and the use of headers, sub-headers
• vocabulary — includes average word length, syllable count per word and the accordance to the common speech vocabulary
• active and passive voice usage
• punctuation and grammar mechanics compatibility

Another important point is your potential audience. You need to now the average level of reading proficiency of your website visitors. The average age charts (which you can easily get from Google Analytics) can help to determine this factor correctly. Common advice would be to aim at least to 60 points of readability score. This common advice can be used in case you have just created your WordPress website and do not have an idea about your target audience.

WordPress Tools for Readability Score Check

Readability score measurement can look like a very difficult task to handle. It is so, if you do every step by yourself. There is however no need to torture yourself. Lots of modern WordPress plugins and services are ready to do the hard part of the work for you. We will now take a look on the of the most popular WordPress plugins that help to measure readability score.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is one of the most precious tools for every WordPress website. All features of this plugin can be explored in our dedicated article. As for readability score, Yoast uses lots of parameters to give you the objective look on what you have written. Flesch-Kincaid is included as a separate string but is obviously not the only thing Yoast checks. All of the mentioned above parameters will be checked by this plugin — and even more.

Yoast will give you a verdict in the form of green, yellow or red emoji, depending on how easy your text is to read. Green light means you have written your text mostly good or even perfectly. Yellow and red lights show that something could potentially be improved. The most important thing is that Yoast shows you exactly where he finds problems and suggests corrections. After that, it is only for you to decide, whether it was your author style or a real mistake to fix.

SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant

SEMrush is a well-known service that helps authors and SEO specialists to develop their websites due to modern demands of search engines. As soon as text content is a very important factor for each WordPress project, SEMrush is engaged in the related analytics processes. This tool is somewhat similar with Yoast. It also uses Flesch-Kincaid score in the conjunction with all possible additional factors for the text analytics.

As a result of its work, SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant also gives you the overview of weak places of your text and suggests changes to it. The tool is convenient with its simultaneous plagiarism check, performed right in the process of readability score count. This feature is very important, because any WordPress author or administrator stands near the risk of writing non-unique content while trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is much less complicated and straight-forward WordPress tool. This plugin can be successfully used by the beginners in the sphere of WordPress administration who do not want to deal with scores and numbers at all. Squirrly SEO just say whether your content is good or bad in a few parameters.

The tool operates with 4 main metrics: keyword density, SEO-friendliness, over-optimization and human friendliness. Each of this metrics are shown in green or red color, depending on their quality within your text. If you have something that could be improved, the tool will also say it to you.

Tips to Improve Readability Score

Here are the most important tips for every author who wants to improve his or her readability score:

• try to keep sentences short: people are usually scanning content in internet over careful reading, and you should always keep it in mind
• imagine that you are talking to a child: it will make you to simplify things over the wish to appear as a sophisticated person
• use “Enter” button on average twice more than you would want to: in this case your paragraphs have lesser risk to be overflown with content
• read your texts aloud: you easily see all difficult parts while reading them aloud
• do not aim to sound like a writer: the better strategy is to write on the level you speak every day

Conclusion

Readability score is a great tool to discover your own mistakes. Sometimes it is painful to realize that other people do not understand your thoughts as you see them. On the other side, we all know how to communicate and should use the same strategy while writing.

Modern readability score tools allow us to automate the main part of the analytics and receive objective advice on each text we write. The authors of the past could only dream of such opportunities!