How to make a game website

If you've made one game, its website is mostly a pitch: a clip at the top, a Play button, a few screenshots, what it is in one sentence, and where to follow you. Keep it on one page. You can host the game itself on itch.io or a portal and link or embed it, which saves you from handling traffic spikes.

A portal is a different business. Players come back for new games, so you need a steady supply, and search engines reward portals whose game pages have real text, not just an embed. The big portals (CrazyGames, Poki) have developer programmes that publish games and share revenue, which is often a better deal for a developer than running a portal alone.

An embedded game is code running on your page, so treat it with care. Use the iframe's sandbox attribute to give it only what it needs (usually scripts and pointer lock), serve it from a separate origin, and set your main site's headers so other sites can't frame it. If you take ads, keep them out of the game frame itself so they don't cover controls.

Game portals tend to make thousands of near-identical pages: a title, an iframe, "play free online". Search engines treat those as thin content and often skip them. What helps is the opposite: a few honest paragraphs per game about how it plays, controls, tips, and links to similar games and categories with a real introduction. Categories are often where a portal's search traffic comes from, so give them a short explainer and a few questions people ask.

A cover image before the game loads. Nobody wants a black rectangle, and a good cover is also what shows when the page is shared. Use a 16:9 image with the game's name on it and a moment of play behind.

A clear Play button and a full-screen option. Browsers block games from going full screen or playing sound until the player clicks, so the first click should be on your own button. Full screen matters for anything with a mouse or fast movement.

How to play, in a few lines. Keys, goal, and one tip. It helps players who'd otherwise leave confused, and it's useful text for search engines.

Related games underneath. Someone who finished one racing game wants another. Linking similar games and the category keeps players on your site and helps search engines understand how your pages fit together.

Controls that survive the iframe. Arrow keys and the space bar scroll the page around an embedded game unless the game captures them, so check that playing never scrolls the page. Pointer lock (for mouse-look games) needs to be allowed on the iframe, and so does full screen.

A way back. When a run ends, offer the restart and a few next games right there. A player who finishes a game and sees nothing else to do closes the tab; one who sees three good covers clicks one. That's how game sites turn one visit into ten.

Modder is itself a game website: every game here has its own page with the game, how to play, and related games, and categories have their own introductions. If you make a game with Modder's maker, it gets one of those pages when it's finished, free for anyone to play, with nothing for you to host.

The maker builds browser games from a description in five to twenty-five minutes, so you can fill a site with your own games instead of borrowing other people's. Making games needs a plan or a credit top-up; the Max plan lets you download a game's code if you want to host it yourself.