Building a Game Tier List Page in WordPress That Ages Well

When I ran a fan site for a fighting game, our most visited page for three years was the character tier list. It was also the page I handled worst. Every balance patch I made a new post, "Tier List Patch 1.07", then 1.08, then 1.09, until search results showed nine nearly identical pages from my own site, all competing with each other, most of them out of date. Visitors landed on an old one, found a character ranked S who had been nerfed twice since, and left in the comments to tell me so.

Tier lists are one of the few page types that gaming communities produce which people search for by name, every patch, forever. That makes them worth building properly in WordPress. Most clan and fan sites build them as an image dropped into a post, and that one decision is behind most of the problems I see when people ask me to look at their sites.

Why the screenshot approach fails

The common way to make a tier list is to drag portraits around on a free tier maker site, take a screenshot, and paste the image into a post. It looks great on day one. It has three costs that show up later.

First, search engines and screen readers see almost nothing. An image with alt text "tier list" tells Google nothing about which characters sit in which tier, so your page cannot match a search like "is Zangief good in season 2". Second, it is painful to update. Moving one character means remaking the entire image, which is why so many tier list images are three patches stale. Third, on a phone a wide tier image shrinks until the portraits are the size of a fingernail.

The fix is to keep the visual feel but build the list from text and blocks, so each character name is real, linkable, searchable text.

One URL per game, not per patch

Before any design, decide the address. My nine pages taught me this the hard way. Use one permanent URL per game and mode, something like /street-fighter-6-tier-list, and update that page every patch. Every link a Reddit thread or Discord pin ever gives you keeps pointing at the current version, and search engines learn there is one authoritative page instead of nine weak ones.

When I finally merged my old posts, I set 301 redirects from each patch URL to the single page using the free Redirection plugin. Within about two months the merged page outranked where the best single patch page had been, and the comments complaining about outdated rankings stopped almost entirely. I cannot separate how much of that was the merge and how much was simply keeping it current, because I started doing both at once.

If readers want history, give it to them on the same page, in a short changelog section near the bottom. That is also where the patch number belongs, which brings me to the build itself.

Building it with core blocks

You do not need a dedicated tier list plugin. The block editor that ships with WordPress handles it well, and the result stays easy to edit for whoever takes over the site after you.

1. Add a patch line at the very top. A single paragraph like "Updated for patch 1.09, 14 October" in bold. Save it as a synced pattern (what older WordPress versions called a reusable block) if you run several tier lists that update together.
2. Use one Group block per tier. Give each group a background colour that matches the usual tier colours, red for S, orange for A and so on, and a heading inside it for the tier letter.
3. Inside each group, list the characters as text. A Columns block with small portraits and names works on desktop and stacks neatly on mobile. Keep the name as actual text under each image, not baked into the picture.
4. Add one sentence of reasoning per character. "Strong after the 1.08 drive gauge change, weak to zoning" is worth more to a reader than the ranking itself, and it is the part competitors who use screenshots cannot copy easily.
5. Link each name to its character guide, if you have one. This is where tier lists earn their keep for the rest of the site, sending readers into deeper pages.
6. Close with a dated changelog. Three or four lines per patch: who moved, which direction, and why. Keep the last five patches and trim the rest.

On the fan site, rebuilding a full list this way took me about ninety minutes the first time. Later patch updates usually took fifteen, because I was moving blocks and editing a sentence, not remaking an image.

The advice I would not follow

You will find guides suggesting special structured data to make a tier list show up as a rich result. As far as I know, there is no tier list type in the schema vocabulary that Google uses for rich results, and wrapping the page in an unrelated type like a product review to force stars into the results is the sort of thing that gets manual actions. Plain, well structured headings and an accurate "last updated" date do more. Anouk's piece on how game platforms use structured data covers what is actually supported.

I would also be wary of tier list plugins that store the list in their own custom tables. Several I tested displayed beautifully but left the page HTML nearly empty until JavaScript ran, which brings back the screenshot problem in a different form.

The ranking gets the click. The one sentence of reasoning under each name is what makes someone trust it.

What a tier list cannot do

Be honest on the page about what a tier list measures. Rankings shift with skill level, region and the current meta, and a character who is C tier in high level tournament play can be excellent for beginners. I added a short line under the patch note saying whose results the list was based on, in my case local tournament data and two top players we trusted, and it cut the angry comments more than any other change. The broader principles of layout for guide pages are in how guide writers structure pages.

A job for this week

Search your own site for every post with "tier list" in the title. If there is more than one per game, pick the strongest, update it to the current patch, and redirect the others to it. Then replace the screenshot with text based tiers for just the top tier, so you can see how long it takes before committing to the rest. For more WordPress how to notes, browse our WordPress guides.