What Is Website Readability Score?
Website readability score measures the accessibility of the content of a web page. This is based on a range of factors like sentence length and the number of words within the page’s text.
How Is Web Page Readability Score Calculated?
There are a range of ways to calculate a website's readability score. Some of these methods include:
The most popular of these being the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease method.
This method calculates readability by taking into consideration the number of syllables in a word, and the amount of words included in a sentence.
The higher the score, the easier it is to read the text. A score of 90.00-100.0 is viable for an 11-year-old, while a score of 0.0-30.0 would only be accessible to a university educated graduate.
These scores are usually determined by:
- Length of paragraphs
- Length of sentences
- Vocabulary level of the text
- Number of syllables in each word
- Use of active and passive voice
Why Is Website Readability Important?
While readability isn’t directly a ranking factor, it still has an impact on SEO. Ensuring that a web page has a high level of readability means that it is more likely to be high-quality written content.
This in turn contributes to a better ranking in SERPs, which means more traffic to the site. This affects engagement levels positively, which usually means more conversions.
How to Improve Your Readability Score?
Keeping all of this in mind, it’s quite simple to create a website with a high readability score. All you need to do is:
1. Make Sure Your Text Doesn’t Sound Robotic
When writing a body of text on your web page, you need to ensure it is both inviting and accessible.
It doesn’t matter what level you are writing at, or the type of content – from astrobiology to cooking, try to keep it conversational.
2. Use Simple Words and Short Sentences
As well as keeping things conversational, one of the best ways of improving your page’s readability is to keep things short and sweet.
Don’t use complicated sentence structures or convoluted words. Instead, bullet-point sentences, break up articles with subheadings, and draw attention to important phrases and words by bolding them.
3. Make Sure Page Typography Is Aesthetically Pleasing
Don’t be fooled, your website readability score isn’t just based on text. The visual elements of a web page factor in too.
From your choice of font and font size to the line height and length, make sure your text is easy to read.
You may think ‘Alex Brush’ is an attractive font, but it will complicate your text.
What Tools Can Help You Improve Your Page Readability?
When seeking to improve your web page readability, there are loads of tools on the web to help you. Some of these tools include:
How Can We Help?
Think you need to work on the readability of your content? We can help.
Get in touch with us and we’ll match you up with a team that can scour your content and optimise it for your audience.
Meanwhile, you might like our training courses that will give you lots of pointers that you could put in motion immediately upon completion!
