What Should You Put on Your Wedding Website?

This is it! You’re engaged and you’re planning your wedding. You’ve booked the venue, the vendors, and you’ve sent out most of your invites. You’ve heard of wedding websites and they seem like a great idea…except you don’t know what to put in them. A few photos maybe? Some details about your wedding?

If you aren’t that sure, here’s a quick guide on what to put on your wedding website:

1. Your Wedding Details

These include the following:

• Date and Time
• Venue/location for the ceremony
• Venue/location for the reception

If you have out-of-town or out-of-the-country guests flying in, they’ll want to know exactly where your wedding will be in case they need to book accommodations in advance. This will also help the people who will be bringing their car and looking for a place to park.

Pro Tip: Make it easy for your guests! Include a map with landmarks and routes they can take from the ceremony venue to the reception venue (if they are two different and far apart from each other).

2. Possible Places to Stay

Whether your wedding is a destination wedding, an out-of-town wedding, or a local wedding, it would still be best for you to list possible accommodation options for guests who are flying in or travelling to your wedding. Some guests who are driving several hours to get to your wedding location might prefer to spend the night.

Pro Tip: If you are booking accommodations for extended family members, some hotels offer great deals. Look them up, or ask your event coordinator if they have any suggestions.

3. What to Do in the Area

If your guests are flying or driving in, there’s a chance that they’ll be there a few days before your wedding, and some of them might even stay a few days after. Let your wedding website include places to visit.

A quick search on the internet should show you the things you might include, such as the following:

• Parks
• Shopping malls
• Museums
• Restaurants

Pro Tip: It would be good to mention how close (or how far) your wedding location is from the nearest airport, as well as the possible transportation options. That way, they won’t have a hard time figuring out where to go, what to do, or worrying that they might miss their flight.

4. Schedule/Program

While you need to be prepared for anything to happen, people like being informed about what is going on, especially if you have a few extra events. You don’t have to make it so detailed. Just give people a general idea of what is happening, what time it will happen, and where they need to be. They’ll appreciate all the details!

Pro Tip: As your wedding website is accessible to anyone who has the link, make sure that the information you put up is for everyone to see. If you have intimate gatherings or private parties before and after the event where not everyone is invited, you might want to skip putting that up to avoid people unexpectedly showing up.

5. Contact Info

No doubt, some guests will have questions or concerns they want to raise. Or some of them will want to write messages of well-wishes. Put up an email address or and/or a phone number where your guests can reach you. If you prefer them to reach your event coordinator, say so on the website and include the contact details of your event coordinator.

Pro Tip: Make an email address that’s specific to the wedding. If you use your personal email address, you might have a hard time wading through all the greetings and requests on top of your personal email subscriptions, notifications, and even work emails. That way, you can also use the event-specific email address to contact vendors.

6. Your Entourage (Bridal Party)

It’s a great idea to provide the names (and even photos) of the members of your bridal party. That way, they won’t feel awkward when they interact with some of your other guests (such as during bridal showers or stag parties).

Pro Tip: Make it fun! Include a line or two about how you met.

7. Wedding Attire

These days, most couples like it when their guests follow the theme they have for their wedding. You can’t micromanage what every single guest wears to your wedding, but you can provide helpful suggestions, such as ‘semi-formal’ or ‘black tie/white tie’ optional’. You can also include what you do not want your guests to appear in, such as, ‘Please do not come in slippers, shorts, jeans, etc.’ Ideally, your guests know the appropriate attire, but sometimes a little reminder won’t hurt.

Pro Tip: Include useful tips where you can. For example, if you are going to have a garden wedding, you can say something like, ‘It can get a little chilly at night, so it’s best to bring a shawl or a light coat.’

8. Some Photos

A wedding website is the best place to display your engagement photos! Select the best ones and upload them for your guests to oooh and ahhh over.

Pro Tip: Sometimes too much is…too much. Don’t upload hundreds of photos of you and your spouse-to-be. Just select your favourites and upload them.

9. Your Love Story

Not everyone knows how you and your spouse-to-be met. Are you childhood sweethearts whose paths crossed again when you were older? Did you meet in high school or college? Did you bump into each other, fall into a lake together, or have another kind of dramatic meeting?

If you’re inviting extended family members, some of them won’t know much about the person you’re marrying. Make sure to include some background info as well as what your hobbies are, how you met, and what you do.

Pro Tip: There are various ways to tell your love story. You can do it in an interview style (he-said, she-said) so that it’s fun and interesting. You can tell it like a story or even make a movie of it. You can also have someone write it for you instead.

10. Your Gift Registry

They say that the website is the only acceptable place to share your gift registry. Instead of sending it along with the invitation, place it all on your website. Some websites come with a built-in registry that will allow your guests to do the shopping there or let you integrate a third-party registry onto your wedding website. You can also just have a list of items that you can update regularly.

Pro Tip: Be practical! Make sure to select the items you really need. Keep in mind also, that your guests will be able to spend different amounts on wedding gifts, so give them various options with a variety of price points.

How Should We Let Our Guests Know About Our Wedding Website?

You can let your guests know about your wedding website by including it in the invitation you send out. Include the link on the card and make sure it’s something that’s easy for them to remember.

Some people prefer to buy a domain so they can customise it with their names, but this usually requires you to purchase a membership with the wedding website. If you want to keep your membership free and use the link they give you, you can always shorten it with bit.ly and other link-shortening services.

Does the Website Take Place of the Invitation?

No, the wedding website does not take the place of the wedding invitation. You still have to send personal invites to your guests (whether physical or digital). If you want to point them to your website so they can access the gift registry or RSVP, you can include the link to your website in your invitation.

I’m a Private Person. Can I Have a Private Wedding Website?

Several wedding websites allow you to place a password that your guests can key in every time they visit your website. This is to prevent people who aren’t invited or even random people on the internet from visiting your website.

You can always opt to create a private Facebook group instead of a wedding website and update your guests there instead.

Can Guests RSVP on Our Wedding Website?

A lot of wedding websites allow guests to RSVP on their site. Before that, you’ll have to upload all their names. Make sure you provide instructions to your guests on how to RSVP (a lot of them have to do with searching for their first/last name).

If you have older guests who might not know how to navigate RSVP-ing online, you change their RSVP-status on the back-end or ask your event coordinator to do it.