Skip to main content
Every WhatsApp business phone number on the Business Platform carries a quality rating, and every message template has its own template quality rating. Meta uses both to decide whether you can keep sending freely, whether templates stay active, and whether your messaging limits can scale. Phone-number ratings are commonly shown as a traffic light:
  • Green — high quality. Normal sending; scaling remains possible when other criteria are met.
  • Yellow — medium quality. Treat as a warning: tighten audiences and frequency before the rating slips further.
  • Red — low quality. Expect restrictions; prolonged Red can pause or heavily constrain the number.
This page covers what Meta documents, how to read ratings in Flowella and WhatsApp Manager, and how quality connects to delivery errors such as 131048.

​
Phone number quality rating

Meta associates a quality_rating with each business phone number (for example values such as GREEN returned by the Phone Numbers API). WhatsApp Manager shows status for each number under Account tools → Phone numbers. Meta’s public developer docs do not publish exact block-rate percentages. In practice, ratings move when recipients:
  • Block your business number
  • Report messages as spam
  • Show weak engagement (low reads / replies) relative to volume
Recent behaviour weighs more heavily than old history. Higher send volume is judged more strictly than a low-volume warm-up number.
For Meta’s product wording on phone quality as it appears in WhatsApp Manager, see Meta’s Help Center article About your WhatsApp Business phone number’s quality rating (linked from the official phone numbers developer docs).

​
Template quality rating

Separately, every template has a quality score based on usage, customer feedback, and engagement. Meta’s Template API reports: Newly created templates start as UNKNOWN. Quality feeds into template pacing and template pausing. If status leaves APPROVED, you cannot keep sending that template until approval is restored. Official reference: Template quality rating. Flowella delivery-health alerts can surface template pause and quality drops so journeys and HubSpot workflow actions that bind to a paused or Red template are not left failing silently.

​
Why phone ratings move down

Most slips come from audience and frequency problems, not a single “bad” template:
A phone number collected years ago for SMS or checkout is not WhatsApp consent. Unexpected Marketing templates drive blocks. Prefer contacts who explicitly opted in to WhatsApp recently.
WhatsApp is more personal than email. High per-recipient frequency raises block and report rates. Cap outbound templates in HubSpot workflows (for example at most one Marketing template per recipient per week unless they replied).
If the display name does not match the brand the customer remembers, they may treat the chat as spam. Use a name customers will recognise.

​
Reading the rating in Flowella

Flowella surfaces phone quality where Meta provides it:
  • Settings → Meta — beside each connected phone number
  • Dashboard → Channels — summary status
  • Analytics — trends that correlate with block or failure spikes
Template quality and pause state appear on the template list and on journeys / workflows that reference the template when delivery-health alerts are enabled.

​
How to recover from Yellow

Most Yellow ratings recover within several days if you change behaviour immediately:
1

Pause aggressive outbound

Stop Marketing blasts to cold or disengaged lists for at least 24 hours.
2

Diagnose

Check Analytics and WhatsApp Manager for which campaign or template correlates with the drop.
3

Tighten the audience

Next sends should target recent opt-ins and contacts who have replied recently.
4

Lower volume

Reduce daily unique recipients while quality recovers, and keep templates High quality where possible so messaging limit scaling is not blocked.
5

Watch daily

Confirm the rating moves back toward Green before ramping volume again.

​
How to recover from Red

Red is more serious. Meta may restrict the number while Red, and prolonged Red can pause sending.
  • Stop the sends that drove blocks (including Marketing templates that are being reported).
  • Ramp back slowly with engaged audiences only.
  • Fix display name or template category mismatches if customers do not recognise you.
  • If the number is paused, wait for Meta to lift the pause or use a different eligible number — Flowella cannot override a Meta pause.

​
Quality and delivery errors

Flowella maps 131048 to number-quality guidance and 131049 to per-user marketing limits — do not treat them as the same failure.

​
Preventing drops

  • Make WhatsApp opt-in explicit at capture time.
  • Set frequency caps in HubSpot workflows.
  • Segment lists; do not blast one Marketing template to every phone number in the CRM.
  • Watch early failure spikes in Analytics and pause before Meta moves you to Red.
Last modified on October 7, 2026