wordlehelp.co

Source for wordlehelp.co, a free Wordle Helper built with Next.js 16 (App Router, static export). The homepage offers three ways to solve: Guess Grid, Letter Clues and Guided Solve. The rest of the site has daily hints, an answers archive, word tools, programmatic word lists and guides.

All solving runs in the visitor's browser. next build writes plain static HTML to out/, so any static host works.

Commands

npm install
npm run dev          # local dev server (http://localhost:3000)
npm run build        # static site in out/
npm start            # serve out/ locally
npm run lint         # TypeScript check
npm test             # engine tests + checks on the built site (build first)

npm run fetch-daily  # pull recent answers (add -- --backfill for all)
npm run add-answer -- 2026-10-24 crane "optional one-line clue"
npm run images       # regenerate illustrations, social images and icons
npm run wordlists    # regenerate word lists, openers and benchmark

How the project is organised

Path	What it is
lib/registry.mjs	One place for every page's SEO: title (≤ 50 chars), meta description (≤ 144), H1, nav label, icon, hero image + alt text, social image, sitemap priority. Navigation, footer, sitemap, site search and social images all read from it.
lib/engine.mjs	Wordle scoring (exact duplicate-letter rules), filtering, ranking and best-guess entropy. Shared by the browser tools, build scripts and tests.
lib/data.mjs	Server-side loaders for word lists, daily answers, benchmark and testimonials.
lib/seo.ts	Builds Next.js metadata (canonical, Open Graph, Twitter) from the registry.
app/	One folder per URL. app/5-letter-words/[slug] generates the 76 letter-list pages.
components/	Layout (sidebar, mobile drawer, sticky top bar, footer), UI (search, toasts, alerts, copy buttons, cookie banner, theme toggle, back-to-top, scroll progress) and content blocks (FAQ, icon lists, steps, cards, author box, testimonials).
components/tools/	The interactive tools: GridSolver, WordFinder, GuidedSolver, Dictionary, Unscrambler, DailyNotice.
data/	Word lists, daily answers, testimonials, solver benchmark and opener rankings.
scripts/	Data and image generators, plus copy-words.mjs, which runs before every build to publish word lists and the search index to public/.

Features

• Three solving methods on the homepage as accessible tabs (#grid, #clues, #guided deep links).
• Left sidebar navigation on desktop, a slide-in mobile menu with focus trap and Esc to close, and a sticky top bar with search (press / or Ctrl+K) and a light/dark toggle that remembers the choice without a flash.
• Feedback states: loading skeletons and spinners, toast success messages, inline error messages, and a retry button if a word list fails to load.
• Extras: scroll progress bar, back-to-top button, skip-to-content link, copy buttons, expandable FAQs, "last updated" dates, tile animations, scroll-reveal animations (with reduced-motion support) and hover states.
• Cookie consent banner. Optional analytics only load after the visitor accepts, and only when NEXT_PUBLIC_GA_ID is set at build time. "Cookie settings" in the footer reopens the banner.
• Custom 404 page, and a copyright year that updates to the visitor's current year.

SEO

• Unique titles (≤ 50 chars) and meta descriptions (≤ 144 chars). Tests enforce the limits and fail on duplicates.
• Canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter cards. Each of the 100 pages has its own 1200×630 social image in public/og/.
• JSON-LD: Organization, WebSite, WebApplication, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage and Article.
• sitemap.xml (with image entries), robots.txt, manifest.webmanifest, favicon.ico, SVG icon, Apple touch icon and maskable PWA icons.
• WebP illustrations with descriptive alt text. Every page links back to the homepage with the anchor "Wordle Helper".
• npm test fails on a broken internal link, missing alt text, a missing og:image file, invalid JSON-LD, more than one H1, or a page that doesn't link back to the homepage.

Daily hints workflow

Answers are fetched automatically by .github/workflows/daily-answers.yml:

• Shortly after midnight UTC (with retries later in the day), it runs npm run fetch-daily. The script pulls yesterday's and today's answers from the NYT puzzle endpoint (https://www.nytimes.com/svc/wordle/v2/YYYY-MM-DD.json), commits any changes to data/daily.json and pushes.
• Hosts connected to the repo (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages) rebuild on that push. For other hosts, add a DEPLOY_HOOK_URL repository secret and the workflow will call it.
• First run: open Actions → Daily Wordle answers → Run workflow and tick backfill. This fills in every past answer since June 2021 for the archive.

From the answer alone, the site generates five hints (vowels, repeated letters, rare letters, first letter, last letter). To add a hint 6 clue, run npm run add-answer -- YYYY-MM-DD answer "clue"; the fetch script never overwrites clues. Once the next puzzle is out, an answer moves to /wordle-answers/.

The NYT endpoint is unofficial and undocumented: it may change, be blocked or conflict with the NYT's terms of use. The script skips dates it can't fetch, never deletes existing entries, and the workflow only fails if every request fails. If it ever stops working, npm run add-answer still works for manual updates.

Testimonials

data/testimonials.json is empty, so the "What players say" section stays hidden. Add real quotes from players, with their permission:

[{ "quote": "Saved my 200-day streak!", "name": "Sam P.", "detail": "Plays daily since 2022", "rating": 5 }]

Word lists and images

• Word lists are generated from SCOWL via wordlist-english. They are not the official NYT lists. The SCOWL license ships in public/LICENSE-SCOWL.txt.
• data/benchmark.json records a real run of the solver over every likely answer. The site quotes these numbers.
• Images are generated from SVG templates with sharp and the Inter font (npm run images) and committed: compressed WebP for illustrations, JPEG for social cards (the most widely supported format for link previews).

Before launch

• Create the [email protected] mailbox, or change SITE.email in lib/site.mjs.
• Add a real author or team bio on /about/ to strengthen E-E-A-T, and add social profile URLs to SITE.sameAs.
• Optionally set NEXT_PUBLIC_GA_ID for consent-based analytics.
• Submit https://wordlehelp.co/sitemap.xml to Google Search Console.