Readability Score Checker

Paste in a paragraph or a full page of copy and this tool runs it through the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formulas, both based on average sentence length and average syllables per word. You get a 0-100 ease score with a plain-language label (from "Very easy" to "Difficult") and an estimated U.S. school grade level needed to follow the writing comfortably.

It's meant for anyone drafting or reviewing website copy before it goes live — a business owner writing their own service pages, someone checking a page a freelancer wrote, or anyone revisiting an old page that reads clunkier than they remembered. Long, jargon-heavy sentences are easy to write without noticing, especially about a topic you know well; this gives you a number to check that instinct against.

The score isn't a pass/fail grade. It's a prompt to re-read specific sentences that are dragging the number down and decide whether the complexity is actually necessary.

How to use this tool

1. Paste a paragraph, or your whole page of copy, into the text box.
2. Check the Flesch Reading Ease score and its label — "Fairly easy" or higher is a reasonable target for most service business content.
3. Check the Flesch-Kincaid grade level to see roughly what school grade a reader would need to follow it comfortably.
4. Check the average words per sentence — this single number often explains most of a low score.
5. Go back to your original draft and shorten or split the longest, most complex sentences.
6. Paste the revised copy back in to confirm the score and grade level moved in the direction you wanted.

What actually drags a score down

In practice, two habits account for most low scores: stacking multiple ideas into one long sentence with several commas or "and"s, and reaching for a longer, more technical word when a shorter, more common one would say the same thing. Neither is wrong on its own — but a page full of both is harder to skim on a phone, and skimming is how most visitors actually read service pages. Splitting a 40-word sentence into two shorter ones, or swapping a five-syllable term for a plain one, usually moves the score more than rewriting the whole paragraph.