Today we’re releasing three free website optimization tools that you can start using right now – check them out below:
What grade level is your website written for?
Our Readability Analysis Tool will examine a URL and report statistics about how readable the page is. This can help you figure out what grade level your page is written for, since we’ve learned that you can increase your conversions by writing for an 8th grade reading level.
Is your website designed to match visitors’ reading patterns?
Our Horizontal Overlay Tool will superimpose a guide showing you where on your page users focus most of their time. The horizontal layout overlay graphic from our blog post regarding layouts can now be used on any URL you choose.
Are you making the right first impression?
Our Site Flasher Tool simulates the first impression you give your visitors. Input your URL and your site will be flashed only for a few seconds – learn why this is important in our accompanying blog post.
Good tools, great to see R & D in full flow!
With the readability tool, I don’t ‘quite’ understand the result:
Grade Level
* Gunning Fog Level12.9
* Avg. Readability Index14
Maybe it’s a USA thing – I am British and the whole grade school thing is completely different here, we certainly don’t have ‘Gunning Fog Level’ anyway! Any guidance at all?
Hey Matt –
Thanks for the feedback!
I must admit I was a little confused as well when the formulas were returning results above grade level 12. It’s actually quite common that they return results greater than the high school grade levels. Some people choose to cap the amount, but we left it raw since it provides more information. As a good rule of thumb, just try and get the number down to 8 or below, as explained in another of our blog posts, the “average” American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level.
Keep in mind that extensive research has shown that the popular readability formulas are not 100% accurate, but they give a “good rough estimate” of the reading skill required to read a text. If you want more information on the specific formulas used and to see what other formulas are out there, check out Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability_test
where are the tools?
Hi Jonathan – Sorry but the tools have been retired. Thanks for letting us know there are broken links to them here!