Creating a website for Gaming-related content can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider including costs, functionality, and ease of use. When a service like Fandom Wiki exists, it’s hard to ignore some of the benefits they offer. These include free servers that scale with your site and the potential for players to fill out all of the content.
After six years of creating and developing various websites that are used for content creation, game news, and building communities; we, at GamerSpeak, would argue that the Gold-Standard for websites (and powers nearly 40% of the internet) remains to be WordPress.
This article will share our various reasons why we prefer to use WordPress versus Fandom Wiki. We’ll share some of the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms. Finally, if you’re still persistent in using Fandom Wiki, we’ll share our tips to make your experience a less stressful one.
WordPress
| Pros |
| Easier to train someone to write an article on WordPress websites vs Fandom Wiki (don’t have to worry about HTML language) |
| The number of plug-ins, themes, and customization is nearly endless |
| None of your competitors can run ads to your players. |
| You can create an e-commerce site with WordPress |
| You own your content. What you post on WordPress is yours and yours alone. |
| Easier for a front-end developer to use (your company’s developers probably know how to use the programming language PHP/Javascript) |
| You can see 10x the analytics using Google Analytics or other Website Analytic software |
| You can run and install email campaigns |
| You can measure your SEO improvement using third-party tools. |
| Thousands of third-party plugins can be leveraged to customize the website. |
| Cons |
| Hosting, theme, and plug-in costs that you need to consider |
| WordPress is a little more resource-heavy. It requires slightly more management by an internal team member than a wiki. |
| There are costs associated with running a WordPress: |
| Based on getting 10,000 users a month, which would be a lot, the costs would be: Hosting: $50/mo Theme and plugins: $250 – $300/yr Initial setup, design, and development (done internally or externally): $5,000 – $10,000 |
Fandom Wiki
| Pros |
| Editable by others |
| Bugs are fixed on their end |
| Regularly new features added by fandom devs (albeit slowly) |
| A dedicated mobile version that is editable (sort of) |
| Easier to build the site using templates (from a contributor standpoint), a dev is not needed as much |
| You don’t have to pay for servers, a CDN, themes, or plug-ins. |
| Don’t have to worry about scaling servers |
| Cons |
| The feature set is inflexible (does not have thousands of plug-ins) |
| We don’t have the control to fix bugs |
| Mobile CSS and javascript editing is not available |
| Very limited analytics: pageviews, top pages, geographic locations, device breakdown, edits per day. |
| Cannot schedule posts to be posted in the future |
| Non-removable ads |
| No search console |
| No google analytics |
| No potential for merchandising |
| Can’t edit the sidebar on the Main Page |
| The expectation of low-quality content and poor maintenance |
| Lower quality of community brand perception |
| The analytics data is 2-3 days behind! |
| Cannot remove an admin IP address from analytics data |
| No role-based (VIP) accessibility. No membership options / gated content. |
| No email list/newsletter. No Active Campaign embedding. |
| No post author unless written manually in the article (by design) |
| Much more difficult to fill out the data inside Fandom, than inside a custom WP template |
| Nearly everything you have to do is a hack and manual with the wiki |
| Users are Fandom users, not your own website users. |
| You don’t own the content |
| An overall lack of control. |
| UGC doesn’t last forever |
| UGC has no quality control |
Why We Use WordPress and Why We Think You Should Too
Below are GamerSpeak’s three main reasons why we prefer to use WordPress over Fandom Wiki and other Website platforms.
Analytics
The analytics for WordPress is far better than Fandom Wiki. At your disposal, you can use Google Analytics, Search Console, and any other third-party analytics provider.
Some of the analytics you can get with WordPress and not get on a wiki are bounce rate, new users, returning users, retention rate, engagement rate, session length, pages per session, referral sources, and more.
You will only receive the following analytic data from Fandom Wiki: page views, top pages, geographic locations, device breakdown, and edits per day.
User Experience
Very few people know how to run and use the programming language of a Wiki (HTML/CSS) vs WordPress (Javascript/PHP) which doesn’t require as much as a learning curve for your internal website developers.
The amount of flexibility in styling and developing the look of the website as well as plug-ins, give developers nearly endless customization to create an amazing website. Currently, the level of customization is very limited on Fandom and can cause a lot of headaches for the lack of basic features that most sites have.
This is largely due to the lack of control you have with a Fandom Wiki website versus a WordPress website. With WordPress, you pay for the website, the themes, the server maintenance, and therefore you have ownership over the website.
With Fandom Wiki, you are “borrowing” a page that you created from the Fandom Wiki website, so you’re beholden to what tools and plug-ins that Fandom Wiki, as a whole, finds useful and compatible with all of their sites.
On WordPress, a Game Developer doesn’t have to worry about another game’s ads taking away from the ecosystem of your game. The last thing you want is to have an opposing game’s ad take away business from you or have your gaming community download it.
User-Generated Content (UGC)
Ease in training someone on how to use and produce content for a website. If the content creator understands how to use Microsoft Word or Google Docs, they’ll understand around 75 – 80% of the functionality of WordPress.
On top of that, you can schedule content to be automatically posted or use a content calendar to date and assign content to your Superusers to write and publish.
You can easily share your published content with email campaigns, newsletters, social media, and gaming community platforms. It’s simply a matter of installing the appropriate plug-ins so when a piece of content gets published, it will be automatically shared across your desired platforms.
Although, it requires slightly more management to have them make UGC for WordPress, however, it’s far easier for them to create WordPress content once you set them up.
If You’re Insistent on Fandom Wiki, Here’s What to Do
While GamerSpeak prefers using WordPress to create Gaming Content Websites, we have had our personal experience with Fandom Wiki.
Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross, a popular IP, and Gacha-game published by Netmarble, has a Fandom Wiki that we run and operate.
We’ve been widely successful in marketing and producing content with our team of Superusers, DncingRetsuko and DK. Our Fandom Wiki launched in April 2020 and has grown to 2.4 million views in a year with 20,000+ daily views.
Here are some tips to help ensure your success if you choose to use a Fandom Wiki.
Hire and Train Active Superusers from the Community
As we’ve mentioned in our three-part series, “What is a Superuser?”, you’ll want to recruit and hire a few dedicated Superusers to create content for your Fandom Wiki.
These Superusers will need to be vetted to ensure they’re active members of the gaming community and engage with some of the top players in the game.
Additionally, you’ll have to teach the Superusers how to understand basic HTML and CSS language to ensure that they fully understand and utilize the tools they have available to them.
The training itself should take 20 hours per Superuser. It will involve basic and advance writing comprehension (grammar, spelling, punctuation), learning how to properly format content, proofread and edit their own and each other’s content before publishing.
You’ll have to teach the Superusers how to understand basic HTML and CSS language to ensure that they fully understand and utilize the tools they have available to them.
For more information about why you should acquire Superusers and how to build them to assist your Game Developers and Gaming Community, please read our series listed below:
What is a Superuser? Defining the Unsung Heroes of the Gaming Community
Hire a Fandom Wiki Expert to Train Superusers
To be blunt, there aren’t that many Fandom Wiki Experts out there. GamerSpeak was incredibly lucky to find ours to help instruct our management team and our dedicated Superusers for Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross.
Once you find an individual with professional knowledge, some of the specifics that your Superusers will need to learn are as follows:
- Create a community wiki with choice of name and URL link.
- Familiarize with Fandom’s latest platform (UCP – Unified Community Platform which started on March 11th, 2020) replacing their legacy platform.
- Best practices of Fandom administrators and contributors. The do’s and don’ts, delimitation, community handling.
- Learning the concept of Wikitext as the main markup language used to format content on Fandom.
- Understanding the basic admin tools. Teaching how to navigate and operate through the dashboard.
- Setting up wiki theme
- Setting up the top navigation
- Analytics
- Customization (Basic to Intermediate level):
- Use of WikiEdit & basics of Wiki contribution – create a page, adding images, links, etc.
- Modifying Desktop and Mobile views
- Creating a page template, Infobox, Wikitable, use other special pages
- Contacting Fandom support to:
- Apply for JavaScript enhancements
- Apply the use of interlanguage links (for localization of pages)
Use the Fandom Wiki Expert to Create a Template for Your Page
One of the major advantages of Fandom Wiki is you can look at other Fandom Wiki websites, and copy their site’s formatting.
We had our Fandom Wiki Expert simply copy and paste the formatting from one fandom page to our Seven Deadly Sins Grand Cross Fandom Wiki, then we customized it by adding a few features and removing others.
In other words, you can copy and paste multiple formatting styles from various Fandom Wiki’s to help create your Fandom Wiki. The amount of time you can save with this feature is quite large, so we highly recommend taking advantage of it.
If you want to ask us any detailed questions about the differences between building a WordPress or a Fandom Wiki website, please feel free to schedule a 30-minute consultation. We’d be more than happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have.
