There’s a lot to love about video games. Considerable research has revealed that children and adults cannot spend a day without accessing their favorite gaming website. Gaming is a vast industry. As of 2021, it was predicted that there would be 2.7 billion gamers globally, with the industry as a whole worth over $160 billion. This is a tremendous opportunity for website owners to access a highly engaged audience with much potential traffic.
We’ll walk you through the fundamentals of launching a gaming website using WordPress, covering subjects such as:
Build a Gaming Website Site Using WordPress
So, let’s start.
Step 1: Work out a plan
Gaming blogs and websites serve a vast community of gamers searching for information on the newest games, consoles, gear, events, and other topics. You have to make sure what type of gaming website you want to build. Here are few examples:
Blog about video games: Some of the things your gaming blog may cover vary from industry news to new game and hardware debuts. There are many ways to monetize a blog, and it’s a fantastic way to attract people to your website. You can include affiliate marketing, subscription-only content, and advertising revenue.
Video games review website: When it comes to investing their hard-earned money, consumers who aren’t sure what to buy can profit immensely from game assessments and comparisons. There is a lot of promise in a site like this. As a result of the overlap, you may choose to integrate the two websites if that’s more attractive to your target audience’s interests.
Professional gaming website: Professional gaming or e-sports has risen in popularity over the previous several years. A multibillion-dollar company with worldwide appeal, it’s now a household name. One or more e-Sport websites may cover matches and tournaments and player ranking, and forthcoming special events.
Hosting gaming server: Host a private server for your favorite game and make money simultaneously as a pleasant personal activity. They also avoid many problems associated with public servers, such as overcrowding, performance bottlenecks, and unruly users.
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Determining where you want your site to go is crucial since it will affect other decisions later on, such as your hosting needs and marketing strategy.
Step2: Choose a domain name
A domain name is a one-of-a-kind, easy-to-remember address used to visit websites such as ‘google.com.’ You may choose whatever name you want as long as it’s available. The following things should be taken into account while making your decision:
Having a unique and distinctive domain will help users remember your website and urge them to return. If feasible, attempt to incorporate keywords into domain names because they have a bearing on SEO.
In addition to branding, your domain name is crucial, as it is often the first impression that a potential visitor has of your website. You can get a domain name from websites like GoDaddy, Google domains, big rock, and many more.
Step 3: Choose a web hosting service
Web hosting is a service that allows you to upload your website to the internet. So, anyone with an internet connection may visit your website.
Almost any hosting package will do for a generic gaming site or one that is simply a blog. A shared hosting package from a reliable provider should be plenty for a gaming blog. But, if you wish to run a gaming server on your website, you’ll probably need something more robust and dependable than a standard shared hosting package. Dedicated hosting and virtual private server (VPS) hosting are both excellent choices.
Some of the best web hosting providers are Bluehost, Hostinger, Hostgator. You can also select a WordPress dedicated hosting plan.
Step 4: Installing WordPress
At this stage, you should install WordPress. This may be done quickly by either manual installation or purchasing a WordPress bundle from the hosting company.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free and open-source platform for creating websites. On a more technical level, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL databases. It is the most user-friendly, flexible, and powerful blogging and website-building platform available today. WordPress is a fantastic choice for large and small websites since it was developed with convenience and flexibility.
Although the WordPress platform is free, there are certain costs connected with WordPress, which are:
- Plugins and addons (both free and paid)
- Themes (free and paid)
What is a WordPress plugin?
A WordPress plugin is a software that improves or adds new functionality to your WordPress site. Plugins may change the look and feel of your website in a variety of ways, from minor tweaks to major redesigns. To develop a specific website style, we must incorporate various types of plugins and addons into our websites.
You can do anything you want with a WordPress site. If the functionality isn’t included by default in WordPress, it’s very definitely accessible as a plugin.
What is a WordPress theme?
A theme is a compressed folder containing a collection of files such as PHP page templates and CSS stylesheets. A theme is made up of template files, stylesheets, graphics, and JavaScript files. All of those files affect the look of your blog’s articles and pages.
A WordPress theme may be used to personalize your website. The WordPress theme is in charge of the website’s design, layout, color schemes, typography, and other elements. Themes display the data and information saved by WordPress in the browser. When you design a WordPress theme, you get to choose how the content appears and is presented. There are numerous alternatives available to you.
Also Read: Widely Used Plugins To Create Social Network Website With WordPress
After a brief introduction to WordPress, let us move on to the next step and select a proper WordPress gaming theme.
Step 5: Selecting a gaming theme
Finding the perfect WordPress themes that suit your needs is one of the most challenging tasks. There are thousands and hundreds of WordPress themes, and we have to pick a theme among them for our website.
So, making your job a little bit easier, here are the top five WordPress gaming themes from which you can choose. These are some of the lightweight, responsive, and highly configurable themes for a gaming website. So, here we go:
1. PlayerX
PlayerX is a feature-packed WordPress theme for creating gaming and eSports websites. A quick look at the PlayerX online demos makes it immediately apparent that this is a heavily focused theme on creating gaming websites with WordPress. The designs of the templates in the PlayerX package all have the style that gamers should appreciate with appropriate color schemes and eye-catching graphics. This style extends throughout the theme demo, from the homepage to all of the inner page templates.
Thanks to the varied selection of templates and layouts in the PlayerX package, this theme is suitable for a range of gaming-related websites. This includes sites for eSports projects, gaming studios, and promoting game releases, etc. You can view the different options on the PlayerX demo website, including the layouts for publishing news, live feeds, portfolios, and more. Also, as this theme has high levels of eCommerce support, you can easily sell items from your gaming website or create an online store selling gaming-related products.
Furthermore, it provides a massive collection of home and inner pages. It has an easy-to-use, powerful admin interface. Also, it includes WPBakery page builder for WordPress, which makes it super easy to customize.
Key features:
- Import demos with a single click.
- There are three different sorts of headers: standard, vertical, and split.
- Shortcode for a video button.
- Compatible with WPML.
- Video and picture backdrops are available.
Price: $69 for a Regular License
2. Godlike
With two highly flexible demos, Godlike can create a wide range of websites in the gaming niche. The first demo has been designed to help you build a general-purpose gaming website, while the other option is focused on launching sites to promote a specific game. However, as the general-purpose gaming demo can be adjusted to suit a range of projects, Godlike works well for gaming news sites, social networks focusing on gaming, and even creating eCommerce stores that sell games online.
Godlike is a multipurpose WordPress gaming theme. You can promote your game, create and grow your community, and much more. On top of that, the theme is compatible with WooCommerce. Hence, you can open an online store as well. You can sell video games, iOs & Android apps, License game keys, and so much more.
Since the theme is multipurpose, you can use it for blog posts and a news-based website. Furthermore, the theme comes with a page builder that helps you to create any page.
Key features:
- Import a demo with a click.
- Menu in full-screen mode.
- Revolution Slider, a visual composer, is included.
- Integration with BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce.
- An unlimited number of colors to use.
Price: $39 for a Regular License
3. Kappa
Whether you are creating a gaming blog, building a review site, or setting up an online presence for your team, Kappa could be just what you are looking for.
This gaming theme is fully WooCommerce compatible. This means that if you want to sell products or services from your website, you will have no trouble at all. Getting started with WooCommerce is free, and you can have your online store up and running in no time at all. If you need more advanced eCommerce features and functionality, then there is a huge library of free and premium WooCommerce addons to choose from.
In addition, the theme has a responsive design. That means your site will look perfect on any screen.
Also, you can easily customize the theme as per your preference. It has lots of custom widgets, and also you can change colors effortlessly.
Also Read: Best BuddyPress Paid Membership Plugins To Create Powerful Community on WordPress
If you plan on publishing reviews of games or gear on your site, then the integrated rating and review system will help you publish this content in style. With this feature, you are free to create your custom criteria and then award each item its score and rating.
Key features:
- There are five sorts of widgets to choose from.
- There are four different page layouts to choose from.
- WooCommerce is fully integrated.
- There’s a built-in review system.
- RTL and translation are both available.
Price: $49 for a Regular License
4. Arcane
Arcane is a gaming WordPress theme that’s ideal for building online communities. Thanks to BuddyPress support, your visitors can sign up, create profiles, and start interacting with each other on your website.
Tuned and designed for gaming websites, Arcane provides a beautiful gaming experience unmatched by many themes out there. This dedicated WordPress gaming theme provides you with the right tools to create a full-fledged gaming community.
It features parallax blocks, video blocks, CSS3 styling and animations, a wide range of typography options, and visual composer integration. Furthermore, you can use these to quickly create a user experience that perfectly suits a gaming crowd.
The pre-built content looks great and should work well with your target audience. However, as the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin is included in the Arcane package, you can easily customize the default design.
Key features:
- BuddyPress and bbPress are fully supported.
- Other gaming widgets and the rating system
- A dedicated staff and a tournament-style match structure are in place.
- The use of advanced typography.
- User team and profile management features are built-in.
Price: $64 for Lifetime License
5. BlackFyre
Created for making social networking sites for gaming communities, Blackfyre provides a wide range of features. Using this theme, you can build exclusive clan sites, gaming groups, content-sharing websites, discussion channels, and more.
Blackfyre makes extensive use of front-end forms to ensure that registering, logging in, and posting messages all take place in an environment with a consistent user experience. There’s no switching to the WordPress admin area back-end here.
With this theme running on your site, each of your members gets their profile page and can create and manage other users’ teams. This functionality is partially added thanks to the free but powerful BuddyPress WordPress plugin and the bbPress community forum plugin. Other third-party plugins supported include WooCommerce for adding a shop to your site, WPML for creating a multilingual site, and the included premium Visual Composer drag and drop page builder tool.
It has an efficient user account creation and management system. Also, it supports Clan creation to help your users to make various plans for their games. Not only that, but using the Clan war system, you can manage team matches between clans as well.
Key features:
- Support for bbPress and BuddyPress.
- WordPress game templates that have already been developed.
- A page builder powered by Visual Composer.
- Clan creation, clan wars, and a management system are all available.
- Animation, CSS3 style, and parallax blocks.
Price: $64 for a Regular License
Apart from these themes, there are many other themes from which you can choose.
Some of them are:
- SquadForce
- YouPlay
- PixieHuge
- GamingMag
- Looper
Step 6: Integrating plugins
As you already know, WordPress plugins add a range of functionalities to websites. So, we have to install some plugins to make our website even better. I have divided the plugins into two parts: general plugins and gaming plugins. So, let’s go through the list.
General-purpose plugins:
- WooCommerce for e-commerce integration
- bbPress for forum integration
- BuddyPress for community integration
- GamiPress for website gamification
- Gravity Forms for creating forms
- LearnDash for eLearning solutions
- Elementor for website page designing
Gaming Specific Plugin
1. Asteroids Widget
This plugin converts your entire website into an Asteroids game in a matter of seconds. Allowing you to fly about and physically destroy the contents of your website. It will not entirely remove the content of your website; you can hit the refresh button, and everything will return to normal.
After installing and activating the plugin, drag and drop the Asteroids widget into a website like any other widget; after you’ve finished this, you’ll be free to make further changes. Add a title and a description to the widget and alter components such as the button text. In addition to utilizing widgets, you can embed the Asteroids game on any website by using the [asteroids] shortcode.
2. MyArcadePlugin
The MyArcadePlugin is another alternative for integrating online games on your website. This is a premium option to consider if you want to develop a full-fledged gaming portal rather than simply a game to add some entertainment to your website or blog. After you’ve completed the program’s quick installation, the only thing left to do is pick where you want to publish your flash games.
Having said that, it’s worth noting that the software’s free edition comes with a few limitations. If you opt to buy it, your website will access more than a dozen different game distributors. Big fish and spill games are only two of the numerous entertaining gaming alternatives available to you.
You can also embed HTML games from websites like HTML Games for free. The main drawback is that you’re hosting other people’s games instead of your own.
There are thousands of plugins on the WordPress plugin portal. The plugins mentioned above are some of the best WordPress plugins, but if you are not satisfied with any one of them, you can easily switch to an alternative plugin.
Step 7: Customizing your website
You can see how important it is to have your own unique brand identity and website for your company. A lack of individuality makes it easy to become lost in the throng. And here’s when customizing your WordPress theme comes into play.
- Go to Appearance > Themes to start customizing your WordPress theme.
- On this page, locate the active theme and click on Customize next to its title.
- On the subsequent page, you can make real-time changes to your WordPress theme. You’ll see a list of possible options on the left, and on the right, you’ll get a live preview of your site and how the changes will affect it.
Step 8: Managing and Marketing
Managing and marketing a website is one of the essential factors in success. You have to continuously monitor your website, update content frequently and follow the best SEO practices. The tools like Semrush, Moz, Uber Suggest helps you in the identification of the keywords and compare them with other key players. Remember one thing; be consistent; you will get the success you always wanted.
Conclusion on Gaming Website
Everything you need to know about creating a beautiful, user-friendly, and utterly adjustable WordPress game site is listed above. Create a unique identity for your gaming website, and let the world know that you have entered the game.
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