Leading the redesign and front-end build of Fextralife, one of the largest gaming wikis on the web with over 60 million monthly visits. A search-first rebuild that reorients the whole experience around the content players actually come for: the wikis.
Context
Founded in 2012, Fextralife is one of the largest gaming wikis on the web, drawing over 60 million monthly visits. It specializes in RPGs and soulslike games, with deep wikis for titles like Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Monster Hunter, pairing expert-authored guides, walkthroughs, and interactive maps with reviews, previews, news, and streams. Its traffic lives and dies by how quickly a player can get from "I need help with this boss" to the exact wiki page that answers them. Over time the site had grown feature by feature, and that core path had become buried under everything else competing for the homepage.
Challenge
- The wikis are the product, but the homepage buried them under news, reviews, and promotional modules.
- Players arrived looking for a specific game or a specific answer, yet search was treated as a secondary utility rather than the main entry point.
- Reviews and previews had no dedicated home, so editorial work was scattered and hard to browse.
- The work was a redesign and a build: designs had to ship as production front-end, not hand off as mockups.
Approach
- Search-first homepage – Rebuilt the homepage around the wiki search bar, making "find your game, find your answer" the first and most obvious action instead of one option among many.
- Review & preview hub – Designed and shipped a dedicated hub that gives editorial content a real home and a browsable structure.
- Wiki index – Rebuilt the all-wikis page so players can scan the full catalog and jump straight into any game.
- Wiki skin – Currently redesigning the wiki page template itself, the highest-traffic surface on the platform, where clarity and speed matter most.
- Design to production – Owned the front-end integration for each surface, so the shipped result matches the design intent.
Visuals
Outcome
site traffic after the homepage relaunch
shipped, with the wiki skin in progress
wiki discovery reframed as the primary path
- The redesigned homepage drove a 30% increase in site traffic.
- Search moved from a secondary utility to the front door of the experience, pointing players straight at wiki content.
- Reviews and previews gained a dedicated, browsable home for the first time.
What made this different
This was a product-strategy problem disguised as a redesign. The hard part was not styling pages, it was deciding what the homepage is for and having the discipline to demote everything that competed with it. Owning both the design and the front-end meant the strategy survived all the way to production, and the results, along with the response from the brand owner, confirmed the bet: put the thing people came for first.