How to create your own Wordle website

A side by side screenshot of Sportle and Miami Wordle with an iPhone used as a frame. — You can play Miami Wordle and Sportle right now!

What started as a fun pastime for a small group of friends in New Zealand back in November 2021 has quickly grown to be a global phenomenon.

Josh Wardle, the creator of Wordle, could have never anticipated the viral sensation his game would become. Today, you can't visit your favorite social media page anymore without seeing the now well-known emoji grids everywhere.

If you're like me, you may want to create your own word puzzles to entertain your friends, fans and followers. This is why I created WORD.RODEO, a progressive web app where everyone can create puzzles like Wordle for free!

This little app has seen a small rise in popularity, allowing everyone to create custom challenges. Many teachers use it with their students, or K-Pop fans have challenged each other with hard riddles to see who's the biggest fan!

Of course, you may be interested in something that lets you do more.

Custom pages from WORD.RODEO

With custom pages from WORD.RODEO, you can now create your completely custom branded website where you can plan and schedule your challenges for the world to play. For a small monthly subscription fee which supports an independent developer (me 🙂), you get a dashboard to customize and personalize every aspect around your branded Wordle-like page.

First, select the plan that suits your needs and sign up with your payment details.

The Getting Started greeting form on word rodeo, asking you for a page title and a URL slug. — Getting started with your custom page.

You'll be redirected back to word.rodeo, to finish setting up your page with a password and the most important settings like your page title and time zone. After this you're ready to create your first puzzle and have it published at the date and time you wish.

Afterwards, you are free to explore all the different settings WORD.RODEO has to offer. Maybe you want your players to be able to play previously missed puzzles? Enable the Archive feature! Or change up all the colors to integrate with your own website design? Every custom page can be embedded into another existing website using an iframe, you can copy and paste the code needed for this with a single click, too.

Scheduling your puzzles

What's a custom puzzle website without regular challenges? You can schedule an unlimited number of puzzles in advance. Each puzzle will be automatically published at your desired time, and every player will see the exact same puzzle at the same time around the world. No more confusion why some people see a different puzzle! 🌎

A list of planned and scheduled puzzles for your custom word.rodeo page. — Plan ahead with scheduled puzzles.

Each new puzzle you plan can have its own solution word of any length and number of hints. Optionally, you can add a hint for your players and a prize message ("award") for the lucky ones who solved your challenge.

With the Business plan, custom markup can be added to your messages to include bold text or links back to your website. Use it to give special promo codes for visitors to use in your online shop, for example. If someone didn't find the solution, you may also provide a consolation prize message.

Customizing the look and feel

A custom WORD.RODEO page wouldn't be very customized without your own brand logo and colors. WORD.RODEO supports adding your own logo at the top of the page and changing (almost) all of the colors you can see. 🎨 When people share their results on social media, a custom "open graph" image can be added that will be shown on their posts in the timeline.

What better way to show what's possible than to provide examples of existing pages. Check the top of this page for some custom pages with a design and theme I personally really like!

Play with your rules

Your custom WORD.RODEO page comes with a plethora of options and settings to further fine tune the game experience just the way you like it. Here's just a small example of options you can toggle on and off for you and your players:

Hide the solution at the end, so it's kept secret and revealed only to those who successfully solve the puzzle🥇
Allow one extra guess at the end to help players find the solution. Click the 🍄 mushroom to 1-UP!
Show a countdown timer when your next puzzle will be available ⏱️
Enable the Archive page, allowing people to go back in time and play previous puzzles and complete all of them
Upload your custom dictionary with domain-specific words to be allowed as guesses 📖

These and many more options are available in your account dashboard.

See who's playing

Included in your Business Plan is a detailled statistics overview about all your puzzles. Check how easy or difficult your previous puzzles were and when people played.

A line chart that shows the number of attempted (black), solved (green) and failed (red) puzzles on the Y axis, plotted over the hours on the X axis. — Hourly play counts allow you to see when people play your game.

This is in addition to each player's own personal statistics which you can enable as well. This makes for an even better player experience and lets them quickly compare stats with other players.

A bar chart listing the number of successfully solved puzzles, by the number of guesses it took. — How many guesses were needed to solve this puzzle?

Maybe you publish the previous day's numbers in a tweet? Stir up some competition to see who's better than the average other player. 💥

I love seeing all the custom designs on WORD.RODEO come to fruition and I am always available for any questions and support about your custom WORD.RODEO page. 🙂

- Julian