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Your WhatsApp phone number quality rating is Meta's rolling, week-long read on how recipients are reacting to your messages, GREEN, YELLOW or RED, and it drives real consequences: a lower rating slows how fast VGraple CRM will send from that number, and a RED rating pauses every broadcast currently running on it. Recovery is not a request you submit; it happens by changing what you send and to whom, and letting the rolling window fill back up with better signals.
Quality rating: first 5 of 7 steps
- 1Open the WhatsApp channel card
- 2Check for an owner alert if the
- 3Look at what paused, if anything
- 4Stop sending marketing to cold or unengaged
- 5Message only recently engaged, opted-in contacts for
Before you start
- Understand this is per phone number, not per organisation or plan. An org running two WhatsApp numbers can have one at GREEN and one at RED simultaneously, and each is paced independently.
- Know that this is not a setting you turn on or off. Quality monitoring, pacing, and the automatic pause on RED run identically on every VGraple CRM plan, including Free; there is nothing to configure to receive this protection.
- If your rating has already dropped, resist the instinct to send more to compensate (a bigger blast to "make up for it") before reading the recovery guidance below; that instinct is the single most common way a YELLOW rating becomes RED.
Steps
Checking your current rating
Open the WhatsApp channel card. Go to Settings, then Channels, then WhatsApp. Each connected number shows a quality badge: High quality (GREEN), Medium quality (YELLOW), or Low quality (RED).
Check for an owner alert if the rating recently changed. A drop to YELLOW or RED, or Meta flagging the number, triggers an in-app alert, a mobile push notification, and, where configured, an email to the organisation owner, so you find out from VGraple CRM rather than from a wave of failed sends.
Look at what paused, if anything. If the rating fell to RED, every broadcast that was actively sending from that number is paused, with the reason stated in plain language on the campaign itself; nothing continues to fire while the number is at RED. See broadcast paused: every reason and what to do.
Recovering the rating
Stop sending marketing to cold or unengaged segments immediately. Cold lists (contacts who opted in long ago but never engage, purchased or scraped numbers, broad "everyone" audiences) are the primary driver of blocks and reports, the raw inputs to a falling rating.
Message only recently engaged, opted-in contacts for a while. Prioritise sends to people who have replied, clicked, or interacted with your business in the last few weeks; this is exactly what the pacer's own slower rate on YELLOW and RED gives you the breathing room to do deliberately rather than by accident.
Review and tighten the content of the templates that were sending when the drop happened. A template with vague or repetitive copy, no clear reason for the customer to want it, or a mismatch between what it promises and what the business actually does, earns more reports than one that is specific and expected.
Let the 7-day window roll forward with cleaner signals. Meta's quality score is recency-weighted, not a permanent mark; a sustained run of low-report, low-block sending genuinely moves the number back toward GREEN over the following days, without any request or appeal.
What actually feeds into the score?
Meta calculates quality from real-time signals over a rolling 7-day window, weighted more heavily toward recent activity than older activity, so a bad day three weeks ago matters far less than a bad day yesterday.
| Signal | Effect on rating |
|---|---|
| Recipient blocks your number | Strong negative; the single heaviest weighted signal |
| Recipient reports your message as spam | Strong negative |
| Recipient marks "not interested" (feedback, no separate webhook) | Moderate negative; lowers your per-user cap for that recipient specifically |
| Recipient replies or engages | Positive; the main way a rating recovers |
| High message volume alone | Neutral; volume itself is not penalised, low engagement relative to volume is |
What you will see
The quality badge on the channel card updates whenever Meta's phone_number_quality_update webhook reports a change, typically within minutes of Meta recalculating it, not on a fixed daily schedule. While a number sits at YELLOW, campaigns keep sending, just at half the normal rate; while it sits at RED, running campaigns are paused and a new campaign can still be created but will pause immediately on send until the rating recovers. There is no in-app countdown or estimated recovery date, since Meta does not publish one.
Settings and options
| Setting or field | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Quality badge (channel card) | Shows GREEN/YELLOW/RED as High/Medium/Low quality | Refreshed on Meta's webhook and the periodic health check |
| Pacer rate | Automatic sending speed for the number, tied to quality | 50/s at GREEN, 25/s at YELLOW, 5/s at RED (4/s flat for coexistence numbers) |
| Automatic campaign pause on RED | Stops every running broadcast on a RED-rated number | Always on; not configurable |
| Owner alerts | In-app, push and email notice on a quality drop or flag | Always on for the organisation owner |
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Rating dropped after a single large broadcast | The audience included cold, unengaged, or unopted contacts who blocked or reported the message | Rebuild the audience from recently engaged segments before sending again; see building an audience from segments |
| Campaigns sending much slower than expected | The number is at YELLOW or RED and the pacer has automatically reduced the rate | Expected behaviour; check the channel card's quality badge, not a VGraple CRM setting |
| Broadcast paused with no obvious reason | The number's quality rating fell to RED mid-campaign | Check the campaign's pause reason and the channel card's quality badge; recovery is behavioural, not a button to click |
| Quality badge shows no rating at all | The number has not sent enough messages yet for Meta to calculate one | Normal for a newly connected or newly registered number; a rating appears after some sending history |
| Rating stays low despite sending only to opted-in contacts | The 7-day window includes older sends with worse signals, or per-message content (not just audience) is driving reports | Wait for the older sends to age out of the rolling window, and review template copy separately from audience quality |
Related reading
A dropping quality rating is one of five reasons a campaign parks itself automatically; see broadcast paused: every reason and what to do for the complete list. Quality and messaging tier are related but separate systems; see messaging tiers and limits for how tier growth works, and why a recipient was suppressed for the send-level guard that keeps a bad audience from reaching your number in the first place.