Is your writing easy to read?
The person who wrote it is the one person who cannot tell.
You already know what you meant
That is the whole difficulty. Your copy reads perfectly to you because you are supplying the context, and every reader who is tired, busy or reading in a second language is supplying none of it.
Nobody tells you it was hard
A reader who loses a sentence halfway does not write in to say so. They take the gist, or they leave, and both look identical in your analytics.
Hard writing reads as evasive
The passive voice hides who does the thing, and industry words say nothing precise. On a page asking for money, vagueness is what doubt feeds on.
It is the cheapest thing to fix
Most of the gain here is putting full stops in. It costs an afternoon, it needs no design and no developer, and it works on copy you already have.
Copy in, an honest read out
Paste your copy
The words, or the whole page. Navigation and footers are stripped so only the copy is measured.
It reads it back
Reading grade, sentence lengths, the passive voice, the borrowed words. In your browser.
You get what to change
The worst sentence quoted back at you, and what to do about it. Usually a full stop.
What it measures
The reading grade
Flesch-Kincaid: roughly the school year needed to read it comfortably. Grade 8 to 10 is where well-edited journalism sits, and where anything meant for everyone should be.
Sentences that lost the reader
One that runs past 40 words is quoted back to you. By the end of a sentence that long the beginning is gone, so it gets read twice or skimmed.
Whether the rhythm varies
Consistently long sentences are more tiring than one long one, because there is nowhere to rest. A short sentence after a long one is what makes writing feel easy.
The passive voice
"The report is generated" hides who generates it. On a page explaining what your product does for someone, that is exactly the wrong thing to hide.
Words that sound like an industry
Leverage, robust, seamless, ecosystem. The words people reach for to sound credible, and the words a reader's eye goes straight past.
How big the paragraphs are
A page is judged before it is read. One long paragraph fills a phone screen, and a wall of text is the commonest reason a page is closed without being started.
Straight talk about what it cannot see
It counts sentences, syllables and patterns. Everything it reports is a measurement, and none of it is a judgement about your argument.
It cannot tell you if you are right
Whether what you wrote is true, useful, or in the right order matters far more than any number here, and no counting will reach it.
A high grade is not always wrong
Writing for surgeons about surgery should read like it. The target is low when the reader could be anyone, which on a public page they could.
The syllable count is approximate
It uses the vowel-group rule rather than a dictionary, because a dictionary is a megabyte of data to move a grade by a tenth. Over hundreds of words it evens out.
It reads English
The sentence splitting and the syllable rule are both built around English, so the numbers mean nothing for another language.
Read your own page as a stranger would
Most of what comes back is fixed by putting a full stop where the comma is.