Your ultimate guide for wedding websites

You may have seen wedding websites before or read somewhere that you should have one, but you may be thinking, why should I bother? 
If the concept of a wedding website is foreign to you, let us first explain what it is: Simply put it is a space online where your guests can learn more about you and your wedding.

Reasons to create a wedding website

1. To answer guest questions

   You may have noticed that as soon as you get engaged, friends and family start to bother you with pesky questions. 

   With a website you will have an easy resource to send them to, rather than having to repeat yourself. When you get a question you can simply text back: 

   “Hey aunt Sally, we have the answer to your question and more on our website: <insert your website link>

   Pro tip: save this message in your phone notes so you can always copy paste it

2. To help with the limited space on your save-the-dates and invitations

   You want to keep your wedding invitations clean and not crowded with text, but especially if you are having a destination wedding or have a lot of out of town guests for your wedding, there’s more information that they’ll need other than just what you can fit on your save-the-dates or wedding invitation, so your website will be a great place to host all of this extra information.

3. To easily keep everyone informed and up to date

   As mentioned above your guests will have questions and you may need to update them along your planning journey on certain things. With your website you can keep them informed and updated about everything they will need to know in relation to your wedding.

You may be thinking: ‘I would hate to have all my private information out there’

Don’t fret, most platforms where you can build wedding websites, will give you the option to have a website that is password protected if you don’t want to have things be public. You can choose an easy password for your guests to use to log into your site

We recommend something like your names or last name (or a combination of your names) + wedding + your date or destination/venue. So for example: HarryandGinnywedding2003 or potterwedding2004

When is the best time to start creating a wedding website?

We recommend creating a wedding website in phase one of your wedding planning journey, so sooner rather than later. Of course you’ll want to have a date and venue secured first.

It's better to start creating an early version of your wedding website before you send out save-the-dates. This way you can include your website information on your save-the-dates and it can serve as a place to keep your guests updated before you send out formal invitations.

You don’t need to have all the information yet, but you can start to set up the framework for your site and keep certain pages with the text: more info to come soon.

What to include on your wedding website

1.Your story & photos

Let’s start with the basics. You want your guests to know they’ve landed on the right website and start to excite them about celebrating your love. 

Your friends and family from both sides may not necessarily know how you met, how and who proposed, and some other fun facts about your love and life together. Friends and family will love to see different photos from your love journey to start setting the tone for the ultimate celebration of your love. This is a great place to use your engagement photos if you have them!

Are you having a destination wedding and have a specific reason why you chose the destination? You can share this too.

2.Travel & Lodging information

Whether you are having a destination wedding or not, chances are you will have guests from out of town.Help your guests prepare and make things easier for them by listing the best ways to get to your destination and any other travel-related information they may need.

If already established, post the links for the room blocks at your venue or close to your venue and provide additional booking details such as: Check-in time, check-out time, booking deposit requirement, cancellation policy and most important, the cutoff date (the last day the discounted room rates are available)

3.Things to do in your city or destination

Guests love to turn wedding weekends into mini getaways, so it’s great to provide them with some guidance on places to eat and local points of interest to visit.

Create a list categorized for: places to eat, daytime and nightlife activities based on what you or your guests would love to do. 

4.Event information

This seems straightforward, but don’t forget to include all of your event information for your wedding and other events such as:

• Date and Time

• Venue information including driving and parking instructions

• Dress code

• FAQs such as: Are children welcome?

• Shuttle information (if applicable)

If you have formal printed invitations, this can help cut down on the need to have multiple detail cards or extra inserts to your invitation suite. You can have a detail card that simply says for more information on our wedding visit our website, this way they can read about parking and the extra questions they may have in your website.

5.Itinerary

If you are having a wedding weekend or a destination wedding with more activities, create an itinerary for guests for each activity and event.

Pro tip: Do NOT list events that are exclusive to a select group! 

Perhaps you are having a family-only brunch or rehearsal dinner. Many of the platforms we recommend below include options to make certain events only visible to a selected group of guests on their RSVP form.

6.Registry

Note that while guests love to know what to do in regards to gifting, it is considered tacky to put registry information directly on an invitation, but your website is a great way to provide this information. A bonus to having online registries also is that guests can purchase gifts ahead of time online without you having to collect a bunch of gifts on your wedding day.

Our favorite modern registry for couples is Honeyfund. Honeyfund is perfect for reducing random gifts and gives your guests the ability to contribute to a home down payment, your honeymoon or other goals you may have as a couple. Check them out, if you are all about experiences over things.
If instead of gifts you want to do some good, you can set up a charity registry with The Good Beginning.

7.Wedding party details

Your website is a great place to recognize those in your wedding party and make your guests more familiar with all the names of those who will be by your side on your special day.

The best platforms to create a website for weddings

There are several platforms where you can create wedding websites that already offer you an easy template to start with. Some of them are free, some are not. Most of them offer free versions, but the free version will of course have limitations to them.

Here are some of our favorites and our reasons for why we like them:

Wedsites

What we like about Wedsites:

• If you are a designer/developer yourself, chances are this may be one of your favorites (So we have been told) They offer the cleanest, simplest, most user friendly option (and we can tell too, as regular tech lovers )

• You can drag and drop and customize their templates.

• The way they organize their guests list tracker and other tools is impressive even to a wedding planner like us, who love our own spreadsheets.

• It’s a female owned modern business and we are here for that.

Appycouple

What we like about Appycouple:

• They have a great app. So with their app available on your phone, you wont need to go to a web browser on your laptop or desktop  which makes it easier to keep track of those RSVP’s.

• You can decide to go eco-friendly and have digital save the dates and invitations. For as much as we love beautiful stationery, and think great stationery sets the tone for a stylish event, Appycouple has the most stunning design options we’ve seen for digital options and you have the ability to request bespoke designs as well.

• You can download printable invites, table names and thank you cards. All of this will be branded according to your chosen theme.

• You can build a website with several pages, including linking to several registries as well as including a countdown timer to your wedding date

Minted

What we like about Minted:

• All of their website templates have corresponding invitations, save the dates, thank you cards etc. in the same design and theme, so you can be sure your entire wedding vision and style stays consistent.

• Atlas Affairs couples can get 35% off their “Save the Dates” and 25% off all wedding stationary plus they can get a FREE wedding website upgrade to custom URL 

Congrats! Your website is done, now how to best share it?

We recommend including your website information on your save-the-dates, as for your formal invites, we recommend including a separate details card that has your website information and password if applicable to keep the invitation itself.

*This Blog posts contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, you will not pay a cent more, but we’ll receive a small commission. We would not recommend brands and or products we do not like or believe in regardless of the commission.

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