The fix, in one snippet
Before: One 46-word sentence with three clauses.
After: Two sentences of about 20 words each, same meaning.Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
For every page with at least sixty words of body text we compute the Flesch reading ease score from average sentence length and average syllables per word, along with the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, the proportion of words of three syllables or more, and how often a passive construction appears. Pages scoring under 30, or averaging more than thirty words per sentence, are listed with the site median for comparison.
This is a measurement, not a verdict. A specification, a legal page or a technical reference is meant to read like one, and a low score there is correct. What the number is good for is noticing when a page written for customers reads like a standards document.
Why it matters
Reading ease is not a ranking factor and no search engine publishes one. It matters because of what it predicts: people leave pages they have to reread, and the pages that hold attention are the ones that get shared, linked and returned to.
The measurement is also a good proxy for a specific writing fault. A very low score almost always comes from sentence length rather than vocabulary, and long sentences are usually several ideas that were never separated. Splitting them improves the page for every reader, including the one skimming on a phone.
Passive constructions are reported alongside because they hide who does what, which in security and technical writing is usually the part that matters.
How to fix it
Work on the longest sentences first; the score follows automatically.
Before: one 46-word sentence carrying three separate ideas.
After: three sentences of about 15 words, in the order they happen.Cut the words that do no work: "in order to" becomes "to", "utilise" becomes "use", "it should be noted that" becomes nothing. Name the actor: "the server sends the header" rather than "the header is sent". Break walls of text with subheadings so a skimmer can find the part they came for.
Do not write to hit a number. A page rewritten to satisfy a readability score reads like it, and that is worse than a long sentence.
Where this fits
Reading difficulty is check 12 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits More than one H1 (low), where several H1s on one page split its subject. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Reading difficulty closes one route in. The next one down is Title does not match the page's own words, where if none of a page's most frequent words appear in its title, the title and the content are describing different things.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Reading difficulty (info severity)
Scanner check id: seo-readabilityThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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