Are Ecommerce Blogs Too Hard To Read?

Found this fun tool* the other day where you can check your blog (or any other web page)'s reading level. Get Elastic happens to be a College/Undergrad level.

*Link removed, tool no longer exists.

Readability algorithms work by analyzing word and sentence length to assess difficulty. While I'd say this is for entertainment purposes only, if your audience is consumers it is important to take a look at your blog and website content and make sure it's accessible to the general public.

The average adult reads at an 8th or 9th grade level, and 20% read below the 5th grade level. Would you want to create a usability problem for 20% of your customers? Not only that, but many English-as-a-second-language (or third, or fourth) may not comprehend above the Elementary level.

How could your conversion rates increase simply by using simpler language and shorter sentences on product pages, shipping information pages and email marketing? Jakob Nielsen has a good article on making your site more accessible to lower literacy visitors.

Because blogs are intended to pre-sell product and/or engage in 2-way conversation with customers and retailers, it's important to write for readability. I ran the readability test on the top 50 online retailer blogs based on subscribers and here's what I found: