What is a Post Readability Score and How to Improve Yours in WordPress

How do you get a person to read your content? You can’t make them do it. It wouldn’t make sense to pay them, but it’s a good idea to make it so that there’s something in it for them. The currently prevalent paradigm calls that something “value,” purposefully leaving the term vague.

You could also turn the problem on its head and start asking yourself why people aren’t reading your content, identifying those obstacles, and removing them. Lack of value would be an obstacle, sure – they don’t read it because there’s nothing in it for them. But findability would be an obstacle, too, so we have SEO to help us understand and tackle that.

As you work down the list of obstacles, you’d come across post readability soon. Reading a post shouldn’t be hard work. To understand what makes your post difficult to read, we often rely on readability scores to show us where our writing goes against us.

In this post, we’ll unpack for you:

What Is Readability?

Let’s start with the most obvious explanation of readability – it’s how easily people read a text. It’s a property of everything you write, and you know instinctively that there are some things you can do to make it easier to read your text.

You can, for example, use simple, short sentences with orthodox structures. Relying on shorter, more commonly used words is a good choice, too. A couple of changes along these lines and you’ll make it much easier for people to read your text.

But we can’t forget that we’re talking about post readability here. It’s about web content, and it has some readability rules of its own. For one, people rarely actually read it — they usually just scan it. They read sentences and keywords and let their eyes be attracted to different elements.

In that sense, the readability of your content boils down to how well you structured it so that it lets people scan it easily — or maybe decide to read through the whole thing if you’ve done your job very, very well.

It’s at that point that the original sense of readability becomes relevant. As does spelling, and that’s something we haven’t mentioned yet. For now, you must understand that, when it comes to the content on your website, readability might not be so straightforward as it might seem.

What Are Readability Scores?

One way you can tackle the problem of readability would be to assign it a score. Rudolf Flesch, an Austrian-American readability expert, devised the Flesch reading ease evaluation, which gave the text a readability score between 0 and 100 based on the following formula:

206.835 – 1.015 (total words/total sentences) – 84.6 (total syllables/total words)

Now, luckily for us, we have handy online calculators we can use to calculate the score for our texts. It’s important to notice, however, that the metrics this score uses are sentence and word length. The higher the score, the easier it is to read the text. It’s also more likely that it uses shorter sentences with shorter words. Plain English has a Flesch reading ease score between 70 and 60.

Another popular metric for determining readability is the Flesh-Kincaid reading grade level score. It assigns the text a level of education a US student would need to understand the text. The formula for it goes like this:

0.39(total words/total sentences) + 11.8 (total syllables/total words) – 15.59

This score also deals with sentence and word length. It’s somewhat inversely correlated with the reading ease score, as a higher ease score generally means a lower school grade requirement from the reader.

These are the two most popular readability scores you could use. One could argue they are what people think of when you say “readability score” because they’ve been so much in use. But they’re not the only scores of these types, and they might not be the only score you’d want to use to judge the readability of your WordPress posts.

Which Readability Scores Should You Use?

The problem with Flesch-Kinkaid and similar readability scores is that, on their own, they don’t give you everything you need to improve the readability of your content. You could chain hundreds of short sentences containing short words into a block of text that would be incredibly hard to read.

That’s why, when writing for the web, you might want to rely on different kinds of readability tools that may or may not give you an actual score. Grammarly, a popular grammar checking tool, has a score of its own. When writing in the Grammarly Editor, the tool takes into account the clarity, correctness, engagement, and delivery to make up a Performance Score that will tell you something about your content’s readability.

The one tool that’s great at showing what makes your content readable is the popular and easy-to-set-up plugin Yoast SEO. It will judge your content by the Flesch reading ease score. It will also check the use of passive voice, sentence variety, paragraph lengths, and transition words.

That’s not even the whole list of markers it follows to gauge the readability of your text. Yoast SEO might not give you a score, but it will tell you what you need to do to make your content more readable. Some of its advice will overlap with the Flesch-Kinkaid approach, and even more with Grammarly’s Performance Score. But that’s not a bad thing.

How to Make Your Posts Read Better

The easiest way to make your posts read better – or be more readable, or have a better readability score, would be to install the Yoast SEO plugin and do what it tells you. It can be as easy as that. But it could be even better if you learned not to rely on it completely — it could save you lots of time in rewriting and editing.

Here are a couple of things you might do to improve the readability of your posts:

There’s plenty you can do to improve your content’s readability as you can see. Try to work it into your writing style one by one and soon you won’t have to rely too much on Yoast SEO or Grammarly for their valuations.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

There’s no doubt that, among the many things your content has to be, “readable” is an incredibly important trait. If it were in a race with other characteristics of content, it might be fighting for the first place with “valuable.”

Readability, however, is a complex term, especially when we’re talking about the readability of WordPress posts. In that sense, the readability of your post and the score you assign to it might only show you a snippet of the whole picture of how readers interact with it. So, while it surely is important to consider the readability score of your WordPress posts, other factors should get their due in attention, too.