Reading ease (Flesch score): Crawl Audit check 188

Short answer: long sentences and long words make a page harder to read, for everyone. The Flesch Reading Ease score turns that into a number: higher is easier. Check 188 warns when your main content scores under 50.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: a score of 50 or more.
• Warning: under 50. The report shows the score.
• Pass: too little prose to score.

How the score works

Rudolph Flesch published the formula in 1948. It is 206.835, minus 1.015 times the average sentence length in words, minus 84.6 times the average syllables per word. Short sentences and short words push the score up.

• Microsoft Word reports the same score and says: "For most standard files, you want the score to be between 60 and 70."
• Nielsen Norman Group: "Aim at an 8th-grade reading level if targeting a broad consumer audience."
• GOV.UK: "Plain English is mandatory for all of GOV.UK." It notes that "1 in 6 adults in England have very poor literacy skills".

It's a formula, not a reader. Lists of labels, product names and figures can score oddly, so use it to spot hard paragraphs, not as a grade for the page.

Raising the score

• Split sentences over about 25 words.
• Swap long words for short ones where the meaning holds: "use" for "utilise", "help" for "facilitate".
• Lead with the point, then explain.

On devmarde.com

Our homepage scored 34.5 on 6 October, so this check warns for us.

Sources

• Flesch, R. (1948), A new readability yardstick, Journal of Applied Psychology 32(3).
• Microsoft, Get your document's readability and level statistics.
• Nielsen Norman Group, Legibility, readability, and comprehension (2015), and GOV.UK, Use clear language, checked 6 October 2026.