What an iframe embed is, in plain language
An embed is a small window inside your page that loads content from somewhere else. The HTML element is called an iframe — think of it as a picture frame, except the picture is a live web page: the wheel, hosted by WheelOurNames, running inside a box on your site. Your page provides the frame; the wheel loads, spins and announces winners inside it. Your visitors never leave your page, and you never install anything.
Because the wheel runs in its own frame, it is isolated from your page by the browser: it cannot read your page's content, cookies or logins, and your page cannot reach into the wheel. That isolation is a feature, and this article comes back to it under "Security" below.
Generating the embed code
The embed builder generates the snippet for you. Type your entries (one per line), optionally set a title, a dark theme, sound and whether each winner is removed after it is drawn, and watch the live preview — the preview is the real embedded wheel, not a mock-up, so what you see is what your visitors get. Then press Copy embed code and paste the snippet into your site. No account is needed, and there are no ads inside the embedded wheel.
Adding it to your platform
Any ordinary HTML page
Paste the snippet where you want the wheel to appear. That is the whole job.
WordPress
In the block editor, add a Custom HTML block and paste the snippet into it, then preview the page. As of the time this guide was written, this approach works on WordPress.com plans that allow custom HTML and on self-hosted WordPress, but platform interfaces and allowed HTML change over time. If your site strips iframes (some heavily locked-down installations do), check with whoever administers it.
Google Sites
Use the embed-code option (often under Insert → Embed) and paste the snippet. Google Sites has historically ignored the responsive wrapper that the default snippet uses, so switch on the builder's fixed-height option before copying — that version gives the frame a fixed pixel height. Platform interfaces change, so if the option names differ in your account, look for the closest equivalent.
Canvas, Moodle and other LMSs
Use the HTML source view of the rich-text editor and paste the snippet there, again with the fixed-height option. Be aware that LMS HTML editors vary: some configurations strip attributes such as sandbox or inline styles when you save, and a few strip iframes entirely. If the wheel appears without styling or does not appear at all, that is your platform's editor filtering the code — not the embed failing. There is no universal workaround; whether embedding works on a given LMS course page depends on that platform's settings, so test on one page before announcing it to a class.
Responsive versus fixed height
The default snippet is responsive: the wheel fills the width of its container (up to a comfortable maximum) and keeps a 3:4 aspect ratio, so it looks right on a phone and a projector without any work from you. The fixed-height variant sets an exact pixel height instead, which is what platforms that ignore aspect-ratio wrappers — Google Sites, some LMS editors — need. If you are unsure, try responsive first and switch if your platform collapses the frame.
Keyboard and accessibility notes
The embedded wheel is a real application, not an animation: the spin control is a button that keyboard users can reach with the Tab key, and the winner is announced in text with an aria-live region so screen readers speak the result when it lands. The snippet always includes a title attribute on the iframe — keep it, because that title is what screen-reader users hear when they reach the frame. As with any embedded content, also give the wheel some context in the surrounding page (a heading or a sentence saying what the draw is for), so it does not appear unexplained.
The privacy side of publishing a wheel
Newly generated WheelOurNames embeds carry the wheel's configuration in the URL fragment — the part of the link after #. Browsers never send the fragment to a server when they request a page, so your entries are not transmitted to, or logged by, WheelOurNames when the embed loads.
Two cautions matter more than that detail, though. First, the fragment is not encryption. The configuration is base64url-encoded, which is a transport format, not a lock: anyone who views your page's source or the iframe's address can decode the full list in seconds. Second, the embed is public by construction — you are pasting names onto a public page. Do not publish private student, employee, customer or entrant information in embed code. For sensitive lists, run the draw on the main site instead. An unsaved wheel's entries stay in your browser and are not sent to WheelOurNames; if you choose to cloud-save a wheel, that wheel is stored under your account as described in the privacy policy.
Older embed codes that carry the configuration in a ?w= query parameter still work — existing embeds were deliberately not broken — but that form is part of the HTTP request and can appear in request or server logs on the initial load. New embeds always use the fragment form; there is no reason to hand-build a query-style embed today.
Security, in practical terms
The snippet loads the wheel in a sandboxed iframe without allow-same-origin. In plain language: the wheel gets the minimum privileges it needs to run — scripts, and the ability to open the "Powered by WheelOurNames" attribution link in a new tab — and nothing else. It cannot read or write your site's storage or cookies, and it sets none of its own: the embed uses no cookies, no localStorage and no sessionStorage, loads no advertising or analytics, and never asks your visitors to sign in. The draw itself uses the same cryptographically secure random source and winner-selection implementation as the main wheel, so the same configuration produces the same distribution of outcomes in the embed and on WheelOurNames directly.