Want to improve the readability of your site? The easiest way to do this is by adding a readability score analysis in WordPress. It allows you to analyze your posts and pages for readability using industry standard tools. In this article, we will show you how to add and improve readability score in WordPress posts.
Adding Readability Score Analysis for WordPress Posts
There are plenty of WordPress plugins that you can use to add readability score in WordPress posts.
If you are already using AIOSEO plugin, then you are in luck. AIOSEO comes with a built-in content analysis tool. This tool checks your content’s readability and make suggestions.
As you’re working on your new post, scroll down to the AIOSEO metabox, 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 you can get more traffic.
Our full review of AIOSEO goes into more detail on all its features.
Some of you may not be using AIOSEO, or may want to see multiple readability scores. To run a separate readability analysis section for your posts, you can use a tool like Readable.
Simply select the “Test By Direct Input” option and paste in the text of your blog post.
This writing analysis metabox will show the readability score of your content using Fog, Kincaid, Flesch, and more readability tests. You’ll also get stats on the number of sentences, paragraphs, and more.
Understand Readability Analysis Scores
Readability tests typically consider the number of sentences per paragraph, number of words used in a paragraph, and total syllables.
The Fog and Kincaid reading scores show the 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.
Flesch reading analysis scores based on ease of read between 0-100 where 0 is the most difficult to read.
Tips on Improving Your Site’s Readability
The readability analysis tools are a great way to improve your content. However, there is a lot more you can do to further improve your site’s readability.
First thing you need to understand is that users don’t always read the entire article. They scan the information to find the interesting bits.
Keeping your sentences short, and using fewer sentences per paragraph makes your content easy to scan. See how to add single/double line spacing in WordPress.
You should consider replacing difficult words with more commonly used and easy to understand words. Difficult vocabulary makes it harder to scan your pages.
Typography plays a very important role in improving the 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.
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 use the CSS Hero plugin.
We hope this article helped you add and improve readability score for your WordPress posts. You may also want to check out these 14 tips for mastering the content editor in WordPress.
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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 .
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.
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?
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.