Overview:

Initially starting out as a fun afternoon project to create an archive for the popular web game, Wordle, metzger.media/games now hosts a variety of word games, such as Word Grid, Word Scramble, and Thesaurdle. With over 70,000 registered users, the site continues to stay popular, with new games and modes being added from time to time.

Technologies Used:

  • WordPress (Custom Theme)
  • Linode VPS
  • PHP, JavaScript, mySQL

Challenges:

  • Because of its large user base, games were being played on a wide variety of devices and browsers, leading to various cross-browser issues. We set up a feedback form on the site so users could inform us of any issues they were having on their specific device. This helped us work through a number of cross-browser issues so we could create a solid experience for everyone.
  • At its peak, the website was being accessed over 1 million times per day. Because of this sudden and substantial increase in traffic, we had to migrate off our shared hosting platform onto a dedicated server hosted through Linode. This allowed us to quickly scale our servers to handle increasing traffic.