How hard is your site to read?

Some pages have to be understood by everyone who lands on them: eligibility rules, patient information, how to donate, how to enroll. This measures how much effort your writing asks for, page by page, and tells you where that matters.

Reading ease and grade level for every page we crawl
Sentence length, paragraph structure and passive voice
A per-page table, because a policy page and a landing page are not the same job
An honest account of where these numbers do not apply

Run your free audit

A prompt, not a verdict.

Readability formulas count syllables, words and sentences. They cannot tell whether your writing is good, whether it suits your readers, or whether a long sentence was long on purpose. Flesch-Kincaid, the standard here, was built to grade school textbooks, so aimed at a legal or clinical page it will report a high grade level for text that is exactly as precise as it has to be.

Where it helps is pages everyone has to understand: anything read by someone who is worried. If that is your site, a low score is worth acting on and usually easy to act on: shorter sentences, fewer clauses, the active voice.

If you write for specialists, read the per-page table and ignore the headline. We would rather tell you which half applies to you than sell you a number.

Readability FAQs

Probably not, and we will not pretend otherwise. These formulas measure effort, not quality or fit. Writing for surgeons, engineers or lawyers legitimately reads harder, and simplifying it would make it worse.

Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level for the headline numbers, plus sentence length, paragraph structure, passive voice and complex-word share. All of them count structure rather than meaning, which is both why they are fast and why they are limited.

For anything the general public has to understand, somewhere around grade 8 to 10 is a common target and plain-language guidance often says lower. For specialist content there is no right answer. The more useful question is whether your most important page reads harder than your least important one.

Not directly, and anyone telling you there is a readability ranking factor is overstating it. What it affects is whether people finish the page, understand the offer, and do the thing you asked. That shows up in your analytics rather than in your rankings.

Usually because it is a different kind of writing: terms of service, a policy, or something written by a different person or era. A single outlier is a page to look at, not evidence about your site.

Yes, and it is some of the most satisfying work there is.