How to Play Wordle for Free Forever

Since Wordle was bought by the New York Times, some people have been worried that the cute daily guessing game is destined for a paywall, especially since the publication has only said the game would “initially remain free to new and existing players.” But there’s a clever way you can download Wordle so it’s free to play forever, paywall or not.

As pointed out by Aaron Rieke on Twitter, the managing director of a technology research and advocacy nonprofit, Wordle runs entirely in your browser, which means you can save it as a .html file. As long as you have that file, you can still play Wordle in its current form.

How to Download Wordle for Free

Saving a webpage is very easy to do., and you don’t even need any special programs to do it. Just open Wordle in your browser and right click anywhere on the page. Select Save as… and save it as a Web Page, Complete. Well done, you’ve just downloaded Wordle and can play it for free forever!

You can tell you’ve done it right when you double click the .html file and it opens in your browser with a URL that looks something like this:

file:///C:/Users/yourname/Downloads/Wordle%20-%20A%20daily%20word%20game.html

How to Keep Your Wordle Score

As pointed out by web developer Jeffrey Carl Faden in a brilliant Twitter thread, you can bring your score across by opening Wordle in the browser and opening the console — we’ll use Chrome as an example, but you can find instructions for other browsers here.

On the Wordle page in Chrome, right click and select Inspect, then on the box that pops up click Console. Type in: localStorage.statistics and hit Enter, then copy the text that appears, including the quotation marks. Follow the same steps to open the console on your copy of Wordle, and type in: localStorage.statistics = then paste the results from the previous step.

It’s worth noting that this will only work if you use the browser for Wordle. If you use your phone, you won’t see any results when you type in localStorage.statistics.