🎡How to Make a Custom Spinner Wheel

By the WheelJar editorial desk

Start with the list, not the wheel

The wheel is the easy part. Open the wheel spinner, clear the demo entries and type your own, one per line. The wheel redraws as you go, so you can see immediately whether the labels are readable at the size you are working with.

Two rules make the difference between a wheel people use and one they abandon. Keep entries short — anything past about twenty characters gets squeezed into a thin slice and stops being legible on a phone. And only include options you will actually accept. A wheel loaded with aspirational choices gets overruled the first time one comes up, and a wheel that has been overruled once is never trusted again.

Pasting works, which is the fastest route in. A column copied out of a spreadsheet, a class register, a list of entrants from a comment thread — all of it arrives as one item per line and needs no tidying up beyond deleting the blanks.

Weighting: duplicate the line

There is no weighting slider, and that is a design decision rather than an omission. If somebody should have double the chance, put them on two lines.

The reason to do it this way is that the weighting stays visible. Anyone standing next to you can count the duplicate slices and see exactly how the draw is loaded, which is precisely what a hidden multiplier prevents. Raffles that sell multiple tickets work on the same principle: one ticket, one slice.

Where duplication becomes unwieldy is at fine-grained weights. Giving somebody a 3% edge means building a wheel of a hundred slices, at which point the labels are unreadable and you are better off numbering the entries and drawing with the random number generator over a weighted range.

Sharing: the link is the wheel

Your entries live in two places — the text box and the page address — and nowhere else. No account, no server-side save, no cloud.

That has one very useful consequence: copying the address copies the whole wheel. Send the link and the person who opens it sees the identical entries in the identical order, ready to spin. Bookmark it and you have saved the wheel; the bookmark is the file.

It has one limitation too. Clear the tab without bookmarking and the list is gone, because there is no history to recover it from. For a wheel you rebuild weekly — a class, a team standup, a chore rota — bookmark it once and never retype it again.

For a group decision, sending the link beats sending a screenshot: everyone can see the same slices before anyone spins, which removes the accusation that the list was edited after the fact.

Remove-winner turns one wheel into a draw

The single most useful option is remove winner after each spin, on the random name picker. With it on, each winner is taken off the wheel, so consecutive spins produce first, second and third place without duplicates, and a class register empties one student at a time until everyone has had a turn.

Watch what it does to the odds, because it is worth saying out loud before the last spin: ten names give 10% each, and by the time three remain, everyone still on the wheel has a one-in-three chance. Survival is not bad luck. It is an improving position.

With the option off, every spin samples the full list again, so the same name can win twice. That is the right setting when a repeat is legitimate — and the wrong one for a prize draw, unless you announced it first.

Putting a wheel on your own page

Every tool page here is embeddable, so a wheel can sit inside your own site as a frame. Set it up first, copy the link with your entries in it, and give the frame a height in the region of 640 pixels for a wheel — enough for the canvas, the entry box and the result banner without a scrollbar.

The embedded copy behaves exactly like the hosted one: it runs in the visitor’s browser, draws from their own cryptographic random generator, and sends nothing anywhere. It also means a classroom or club page can carry its own permanent wheel with the right names already on it.

Once the wheel is built, the process questions matter more than the mechanics — fair ways to pick a giveaway winner covers the part that actually gets disputed.