Website readability

The readability of a particular text depends on content and typography . Readable sentence length goes on decreasing as we go down the page. In addition to mental fatigue and short attention spans, it is physical fatigue as well. The optimum range for sentence length is about 45 to 75 characters.

• First off, header size is just as important as the size of the body text.
• Using a single font throughout the entire website gets boring and, although readable, shouldn’t be done.
• SEO Review offers 60 free search engine optimization tools, including Content Analysis.
• For the background, use colors that are much subtler and duller than those of the text.
• Write your captions to capture interest just as you write headlines to woo the reader.

We tell you every possible statistic you might want to know about your content, from the number of syllables you’ve used to its total speaking time. We look at the language you use on each page to tell you whether your sentiment is generally positive, negative or neutral. We will tell you what proportion of the literate general public will be able to read your content without problems. We then analyse every page we find, stripping out headers, footers and any other non-content text, to end up with just the meat of every page. We will track down every page, every sitemap and every piece of content we can.

How to test your website’s readability

The example below underlines and uses a different color for links. LetterpressAnother very common form of Web typography styling is letterpress.

This allows for a visually pleasing layout that flows smoothly and looks awesome. Articles on Fuel Your Creativity have very smart spacing between the headers and sub-headers. Tutorial9 Pay attention to how this article on Tutorial9 provides a good amount of spacing and a nice border around images. The text flows, and the image doesn’t detract from the text. Macalicious This article makes good use of alternating colors in its headers. The body text is also very readable and has a legible contrast. They help separate content from the rest of the design and layout.

#5 Pay attention to typography for better legibility

SEO Review offers 60 free search engine optimization tools, including Content Analysis. It allows you to enter primary and secondary keywords and offers suggestions for other keywords and SEO optimization. Its website readability tool scans, scores, and continually monitors the content of your website, including headers, footers, and non-content text. Line height is the distance between two adjacent lines of text. If there’s more space between the lines, it’s easier to read. Even the best blog post or sales copy won’t save you if the readability is poor.

Fortunately, these issues are easy to solve with some careful content editing. You can also add H3s and even H4s for long-form content. Using an increasingly smaller font helps show hierarchy.

Setting a Readability Target for Your Site

The Flesch reading ease score indicates how readable a portion of text is, ranging from 0 to 100 . Use this tool to measure the readability of your content and you’ll end up with a masterpiece tailor-made for your audience. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with poor readability – what you say is often less important than how you say it. We provide readability scores using over a dozen different algorithms and standards so you can work with the one that works best for you. Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand a written text.

• Doing so benefits people with cognitive impairments, people who do not speak English as a first language, and people who may be distracted while reading.
• Readable text affects how users process the information in the content.
• Spot color, images and graphics can help guide your reader through the content.
• But it’s hard to craft content that’s easy to read; even the most experienced writers struggle with it at times.
• This includes identifying adverbs, passive constructions, phrases with simpler alternatives, and difficult-to-read sentences.
• In any text, letter spacing is an obvious factor in legibility.

Check to see if your sentence has a strong verb that drives the action. Online grammar check tools like the Hemingway Editor can help your writer identify and eliminate instances of passive voice when you buy website content.

Grammarly Online Writing Assistant

If your target group is primarily academics, an article with a lower readability score will be more appropriate. On the other hand, should your target audience be the general public, that same article would be too difficult for the majority of them to appreciate. People tune out and hit the back button when they don’t understand what you write. Even if I use the most persuasive copywriting techniques, if I’m not clear, my clients will lose leads and sales. That’s why I use Readable to match my copy with my audience’s reading level. Not just images, image captions are scannable elements as well.

• In print layout, negative letter spacing is a common technique to add a more fun feel to the layout, but it should never be used in body text.
• It checks for passive voice, transition words, subheading distribution, paragraph length, sentence length, and consecutive sentences.
• Line height is another factor in the readability of body text and even headers.