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Every WhatsApp phone number on the Business Platform carries a quality rating that Meta uses to decide whether the number can keep sending and whether it deserves to graduate to higher messaging tiers. The rating is a traffic light:
  • Green — high quality. No restrictions. Tier upgrades can happen.
  • Yellow — medium quality. No immediate restrictions, but tier upgrades are paused. A warning to fix things before they slip to red.
  • Red — low quality. Messaging is heavily restricted, and Meta can pause your account entirely if the rating doesn’t recover.
This page covers what drives the rating, how to read it in Flowella, and how to recover if you slip.

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What Meta tracks

The quality rating is mostly driven by recipient signals — how the people you message react. The big inputs:
  • Block rate. What proportion of recipients block your number? This is the single largest factor. Even small numbers (1–2%) move ratings down quickly.
  • Report rate. What proportion explicitly reported your messages as spam in WhatsApp? Less common but heavily weighted when it does happen.
  • Read rate. Are your messages getting opened or sitting unread for days? Persistent unread implies the recipient isn’t interested.
  • Reply rate. Do recipients engage back, or is your sending one-way?
  • Recency. Recent signals matter more than historical ones. A bad week tanks the rating quickly; a good week recovers it within a few days.
  • Volume. A number sending 50 messages a day is judged more leniently than one sending 5,000. Higher-volume numbers face stricter quality standards.
Meta doesn’t publish exact thresholds, but block rate above ~2% reliably triggers Yellow, and above ~4–5% triggers Red.

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Why ratings move down

Most rating slips come from one of three patterns:
The single biggest cause. “They gave us their phone number when they bought from us five years ago, so we can message them on WhatsApp” is not consent. Customers don’t expect a marketing message via WhatsApp and they block more aggressively than they would on email.Fix: only send to contacts who’ve explicitly opted in to WhatsApp in the last 6–12 months. Run a re-permission campaign by SMS or email if you need to refresh consent.
WhatsApp is a more personal channel than email. Once a week to the same person is high frequency; daily is almost always too much. Block rates spike when you exceed what the audience can tolerate.Fix: cap per-recipient frequency in your workflow design. A simple rule: “no more than one outbound template per recipient per 7 days unless they replied to the last one.”
A customer who signed up for booking reminders doesn’t expect a marketing template. A customer who signed up for marketing doesn’t expect a transactional verification message they didn’t ask for. Either way, the mismatch causes blocks.Fix: align template categories to the consent the recipient gave you. See Template rejected for category guidance.
If your display name is “Acme Marketing Ltd” but the customer signed up with the brand “Flowmaster”, they may not recognise the sender and block as spam. Pick a display name that customers will recognise.

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Reading the rating in Flowella

Flowella surfaces the current quality rating on:
  • Settings → Meta — listed next to each phone number, refreshed every few minutes from Meta
  • Dashboard → Channels widget — quick traffic-light summary
  • Analytics — longer-term trends including block-rate spikes
If a rating moves down, Flowella shows a warning banner with a link back to this page.

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How to recover from Yellow

Most Yellow ratings recover within 3–7 days if you immediately change what you’re doing. Don’t just keep sending and hope.
1

Stop the current campaign

Pause any active outbound templates. Send nothing for at least 24 hours.
2

Diagnose the cause

Look at recent block-rate spikes in Analytics. Which campaign correlates? Which template category? Were any of them sent to a list that wasn’t recently opted in?
3

Trim the audience

For the next sends, restrict to your most-engaged audience: contacts who’ve replied recently, or who you know opted in within the last 90 days.
4

Lower the volume

Send half the volume you were sending before, for a week. Lower volume gives Meta less recent data to weight, and it gives your block rate room to recover proportionally.
5

Watch the rating

Check daily. Within a week of clean sends, Yellow usually returns to Green.

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How to recover from Red

Red is more serious. Meta restricts the number’s messaging while Red, and prolonged Red can cause the number to be flagged or paused entirely. Same steps as Yellow, but:
  • Stop sending immediately, not just pause campaigns. Including transactional templates if they’re causing blocks.
  • Take longer to ramp back up. Two weeks of light, well-targeted sending before resuming normal volume.
  • Consider a new display name if customers consistently don’t recognise the sender.
  • Open a Meta support ticket if the rating doesn’t move after a fortnight of clean behaviour. Sometimes a recent flag can be appealed.
If the number is paused outright, your only option is to wait for Meta to lift the pause (usually 2–4 weeks) or move to a different number.

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Preventing rating drops in the first place

The boring advice is the most effective:
  • Build the opt-in flow with WhatsApp in mind. Make the channel explicit at signup, not assumed.
  • Set frequency caps in HubSpot workflows. Never let two campaigns fire to the same recipient on the same day.
  • Send the right template to the right person. Use HubSpot lists and properties to segment, not blast.
  • Watch the early signals. Block-rate spikes appear in Analytics within hours; respond to them quickly, not after a week.