I Built a Real-Time Multiplayer Wordle Game on 0.5 vCPU — What Would You Improve?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building a small side project called BuildWordle — a real-time multiplayer Wordle game where friends can play the same word together in private rooms.

It started because my girlfriend and I used to text each other our Wordle scores every day. There was no way to actually see each other’s progress live, so I decided to build it.

A few interesting constraints:

• Single container
• 0.5 vCPU
• 2GB RAM
• Long-polling instead of WebSockets
• No accounts required

At around ~70–80 concurrent players, CPU becomes the bottleneck (not memory). That was a surprising lesson.

Right now I’m focused on:

• Improving multiplayer stability
• Making the “players online” counter accurate
• Growing organic traffic (SEO + backlinks)
• Keeping infrastructure lean

I’d love feedback from other builders:

Would you use WebSockets at this stage or keep long-polling?

What’s the smartest way to grow something like this without paid ads?

Any obvious product improvements I might be missing?

Here’s the project if you’re curious:
https://buildwordle.com

Appreciate any thoughts 🙏