Do you know the readability level of your website homepage? Or landing pages? Or interior pages?
If the website’s text is too difficult, you’ll scare visitors away.
Your website might be just what they’re looking for. If they can’t figure that out due to big words and complicated sentence structure, your visitors will never know. Further, they’ll never come back.
I went through about ten drafts of the text on my homepage after reading several books on homepage design.
The first draft was pure self-indulgence. It writhed with witty wordplay and complicated sentence structure.
The tenth draft was, I thought, straight-forward and direct. The current homepage is a slight variation on it. I confidently plugged its URL into Juicy Studio’s free online readability tool, and squirmed at the analysis:
Gunning Fog Index 12.09
Flesch Reading Ease 55.28
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.39
What that says is almost half the possible visitors wouldn’t be able to easily read that homepage. The word choice and grammar require a high-school education (grade 12).
Hm. Maybe Juicy Studio is biased, I thought. I’ll try Readability.Info to corroborate. Results:
Gunning Fog Index 11.2
Flesch Reading Ease 66.5
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.5
Readability.Info was a bit kinder to my homepage. But the grade level is still too high at 11. The target should be at most 8th grade level, preferably a bit below.
Work remains to simplify my homepage text.
How does your website score for readability?
For more information on readability, see my Squidoo Lens on Readability.
For a quick-and-dirty offline test of readability, MS Word™ provides readability stats as an option for the spell-check facility. (Word > Preferences > Spelling and Grammar, then check the box to Show readability statistics.) The Flesch-Kincaid method is used, so the result may be kinder than it deserves.
UPDATE: I ran this post through Juicy Studio.
Gunning Fog Index 11.14
Flesch Reading Ease 47.19
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.37
At least I’m consistent.
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Carnival of Marketing August 13, 2006…
Welcome to the August 13, 2006 edition of the Carnival of Marketing. Summer is winding to a close, kids are heading back to school, and it’s time to take down the big top and move this carnival elsewhere. For our last carnival hosting this summer…