Most website owners write content thinking their audience will stick around to read every word. But here’s the reality: if your content is hard to read, people will leave within seconds.
At WPBeginner, we rely on readability score analysis to make sure our international audience easily understands our content, regardless of their background or expertise. This makes our articles more inclusive and inviting to all readers.
We’ve found that readability scores are one of the most practical tools for improving user engagement. These scores tell you if your writing is too complex, your sentences are too long, or your vocabulary is too advanced for your target audience.
The best part? WordPress makes it incredibly easy to add readability analysis to your workflow. We’ll walk you through the top methods to implement readability scoring, interpret the results, and make simple changes that dramatically improve how people interact with your content.
Why Improve the Readability of Your WordPress Posts?
At WPBeginner, we’ve seen how readability improvements can transform a website’s performance. When we simplified our content structure and focused on clearer writing, we noticed visitors staying longer on our pages and engaging more with our content.
Here’s what happens when you improve your content’s readability:
- Better SEO rankings – Google favors content that users can easily read and understand
- Higher engagement rates – Readable content keeps visitors on your site longer
- Improved accessibility – Your content becomes inclusive for readers with different skill levels and backgrounds
- Increased conversions – Clear, simple content helps visitors take action more easily
The best part? You don’t need to be a writing expert to improve your readability scores. Modern WordPress plugins and online tools make it easy to analyze your content and get specific suggestions for improvement.
These tools will show you exactly which sentences are too long, which words are too complex, and how to make your content more engaging for your target audience.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to add and improve the readability score in WordPress posts. We will cover two methods and also explain how to understand the scores and improve your site’s readability:
Method 1: Adding Readability Score Analysis With All in One SEO
If you are already using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin, then you are in luck. All in One SEO comes with a built-in content analysis tool that checks your content’s readability and makes suggestions.
As you are working on your new post, you just need to scroll down to the AIOSEO meta box, and you will find the content analysis below the focus keyword.
AIOSEO also has lots of other features to help you improve your readability score and boost your WordPress SEO so that you can get more traffic.
Our full review of AIOSEO goes into more detail on all its features.
Bonus: AIOSEO also offers another powerful tool called SEOBoost that will check your content’s readability. This online content optimization tool will give your content a readability score and suggests what reading level it should be by analyzing the top-ranking articles for your keyword.
Method 2: Adding Readability Score Analysis With Readable
Some of you may not be using AIOSEO or may want to see multiple readability scores. To run a separate readability analysis on your posts, you can use an online tool like Readable.
First, you need to head over to the Readable website.
Once there, you can type or paste the URL of your post into the field in the ‘Enter URL’ tab.
Alternatively, you can click on the ‘Enter Text’ tab and paste the text of your blog post.
You will be shown a Readability Results page that shows the readability score of your content using Flesche Kincaid, Gunning Fog, Smog, and more readability tests. You will also get stats on the number of sentences, paragraphs, and more.
Understanding Readability Analysis Scores
Readability tests typically consider the number of sentences per paragraph, the number of words used in a paragraph, and the total syllables.
The grade level indicators show the number of years of education required to read the passage as their score. This means that the higher the score, the more difficult your content is to read.
On the other hand, the Flesch Kincaid score is based on ease of reading between 0-100, where 0 is the most difficult to read.
Tips on Improving Your Site’s Readability
Using a readability analysis tool is a great way to improve your content. However, there is a lot more you can do to improve your site’s readability further.
The first thing you need to understand is that users don’t always read the entire article. They scan the information to find interesting bits.
Keeping your sentences short and using fewer sentences per paragraph makes your content easy to scan. You can see how to add line breaks in WordPress.
You should also consider replacing difficult words with words that are more common and easy to understand. Difficult vocabulary makes it harder to scan your pages.
Typography plays a very important role in improving readability. If your text is too small and difficult to read, then this will obviously affect user experience on your site. Even if your content is well-written, it will be hard to read.
If you are using Google Fonts on your website, then stick with one or two fonts throughout your page.
You should also make sure there is plenty of white space on your pages. If your content blocks are too close to each other, then try adding padding between them.
You can do that by using CSS in your theme’s stylesheet. If you don’t know CSS, then you can see our guide on how to use custom CSS in WordPress.
Expert Guides on Optimizing Content in WordPress
We hope this article helped you add and improve the readability score for your WordPress posts. You may also want to see some other guides related to optimizing your content in WordPress:
- Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO Like a Pro (Checklist)
- WordPress SEO Checklist for Beginners
- Best Online Content Optimization Tools for WordPress
- Best Writing Assistant Software for WordPress (Compared)
- How to Use the SEO Writing Assistant in WordPress to Improve SEO
- How to Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress
- Best Online Grammar Checker Tools for WordPress
- What is Content Decay? (And How to Fix It)
- How to Rank New WordPress Content Faster
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Samson
I am just starting up, I have to admint that wpbeginner have been like home for me in the last few weeks. Laerning and putting what I’ve learned in practice. Please help in any way possible that I may be doing wrong or where i need to improve .
Mikael Andersen
Though I can see the advantages of these readability tools, but on the other hand, I think it is a quite a dangerous way to write content. If all writers/bloggers are going to level down the standards of content and start using only easy understandable texts, then it will result in more and more people that can only understand simple written texts.
Marcelo Pedra
I want to ask: all of these tests work only for english? or are them enough trustworthy for other languages like spanish, french, german, etc?
WPBeginner Support
The formulas for readability tests were designed with English language in mind. Some components like shorter sentences, words per sentence, sentences per paragraph, etc. can work for other languages that use Latin script.
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