If you’re like me, and made the mistake of searching for Wordle on the App Store amidst the word game’s initial frenzy, you might assume that asking “How to download Wordle” is a trick question. It’s true — the game isn’t available for download on as any kind of app (at least the official one isn’t, anyway). Created by software engineer Josh Wardle, the game exists solely on the web browser — it uses a unique code to generate a five-letter word puzzle each day at midnight.
However, with The New York Times’ recent “low seven-figure” acquisition of the game, many have feared whether a paywall hurdle will obstruct their daily trip to Wordle-town. According to the newspaper, Wordle will “initially” remain free. But savvy Times gamers know that a subscription to the rest of their suite of games costs $1.25 a week, and the only free option to play their crossword is to play the Mini or a limited daily selection previously-published puzzles.
If you’re not willing to take your chances, though, there is a way to download Wordle onto your phone, thanks to the game’s coding, which, according to Mashable, is entirely client-side. This means that the web page’s coding is available to be downloaded and even accessed offline.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to downloading Wordle that you’ll hopefully be able to get right in six tries or fewer.
How To Download Wordle
While this solution might have been hiding in plain sight, The Verge reports that one of the first internet users to reveal this hack was technologist Aaron Rieke.
To download Wordle on web browsers like Safari or Chrome, all you’ll need to do is open the Wordle website, click “File” from your upper left tab, and click “Save As” or “Save Page As…” Name the file however you’d like to remember it, and click save. The site will be saved as an .html file for you to access whenever. The steps are almost identical for any browser. On Windows, you’ll just need to right-click on the window and save the page as you normally would.
Rieke also noted that you can access Worlde on a “mirror page” — which is basically just any internet archive that has Wordle saved. (He links to Wayback Machine’s archive as an example.) Rieke tweeted that anyone who downloads the original code of the web page will be playing the same puzzle each day as anyone else, since each day’s puzzle is already programmed into the code (This feature in the publicly accessible code is also the reason that Twitter bots could spoil upcoming clues. The internet continues to not have nice things.)
So, there you have it. You can now ensure that you’ll be able to access Wordle, play it, and annoy your followers by posting your results for the rest of eternity.
