What I’m learning while building a browser games website
Hi everyone,
A few weeks ago, I launched Playgima, a free browser games platform built with Astro, Cloudflare, and Supabase.
Instead of making this a launch post, I wanted to share a few practical things I’m learning while building and improving the project.
1. Game pages are easier than category pages
Individual game pages are straightforward to structure.
Each page can include:
- A clear title
- A playable game area
- A short description
- Game details
- Controls
- Similar games
- FAQs
The harder part is building strong category pages.
Pages like “Action Games”, “Puzzle Games”, or “Racing Games” can easily become thin pages if they only show a grid of games. I’m now working on adding better introductions, useful explanations, related categories, and FAQs to make these pages more valuable for both users and search engines.
2. SEO is more about structure than adding more pages
At first, it is tempting to keep adding more games.
But I’m realizing that having more pages is not enough if the structure is weak.
The areas I’m focusing on now are:
- Cleaner internal linking
- Better category content
- Canonical URL consistency
- Sitemap quality
- Avoiding low-value pages
- Making sure important pages are crawlable
For a content-heavy website, technical SEO becomes part of the product itself.
3. User retention matters even for simple browser games
A browser games website looks simple from the outside, but retention is still a real challenge.
Some features I’m thinking about or improving:
- Recently played games
- Favorites
- Better related games
- Faster access to popular games
- Cleaner mobile experience
- Less friction before playing
The goal is not only to get users to visit one page, but to help them discover another game naturally.
4. Performance is tricky because of embedded games
Astro and Cloudflare help a lot with speed, but game pages can still be affected by iframes, images, third-party assets, and ads.
I’m trying to think about performance in terms of:
- How fast the page feels
- How quickly the user can start playing
- Whether layout shifts happen
- Whether the game area loads smoothly
- How mobile users experience the page
For this kind of project, “time to playable” may be more important than a perfect generic score.
5. Brand building takes longer than publishing
The biggest lesson so far is that launching the website is only the beginning.
The real work is making the platform recognizable and trustworthy over time through:
- Better page quality
- Better design consistency
- Useful content
- Cleaner SEO
- Natural feedback
- Small improvements every week
For now, I’m treating Playgima as a long-term project rather than a quick traffic experiment.
Context: the project is here if anyone wants to see what I’m building:
https://playgima.com
I’d be interested to hear from other founders building content-heavy or SEO-driven products:
What would you improve first: content quality, technical SEO, retention features, or backlinks?
One thing I've noticed with projects like this is that the most important improvement isn't always the one that's furthest behind.
Sometimes it's the one that changes how you interpret all the others.
That's what makes prioritization surprisingly difficult once several reasonable paths are available at the same time.
That’s a good point.
I’m starting to realize that prioritization is not just about fixing what looks weakest. Sometimes one improvement changes the meaning of everything else.
For example, with Playgima, improving categories is not only a “navigation” task. It affects discovery, retention, SEO, and even how I judge whether users are finding the right games.
So the hard part is not choosing between good and bad options. It is choosing between several reasonable improvements and identifying which one gives better signal for the next decisions.
That part has been harder than I expected.
I think your last paragraph is where the interesting conversation starts.
The way you're thinking about "better signal for the next decisions" raised a question for me that I'd rather explore with Playgima as the context than turn into a generic thread discussion.
What's the best email to reach you on?