Word complexity

What is the word complexity assessment?

Some texts are harder to read than others. What makes a piece of content hard to read? Well, for starters, difficult words that a reader doesn’t understand will probably make the reader give up on your text sooner rather than later. Our new assessment lets you highlight those complex words so you can replace the with others and make your text easier to read and understand.

Keep your readers engaged on your content

Highlight complex words in your content
Make your texts easier to read by replacing complex words
Improve the readability score of your post

Example of highlighted complex words in a piece of text

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How to highlight and replace complex words?

It’s easy! You can find this feature in the SEO assessments section in the Yoast SEO sidebar or metabox. It shows you whether you have too many complex words in your text, or not! If you do, there will be an eye-icon to click on that will immediately highlight all the complex words in your text.

What is complex?

While the Flesch Reading Ease assessment, which has now moved to the Insights tab, will score your text on roughly the same words, it wasn’t able to highlight complex words for you. With the new feature, you can! But, you might discover that it highlights words that you find are not that difficult to understand at all. Then, you can safely skip our feedback. Remember, no one knows your audience better than you!