11 Essential Steps to Create Your Dream Wedding Website

Updated Dec 30, 2023.

Do you want to build your dream wedding website but don’t know which tools to use to save time and money? Here are the top five wedding website builders.

Squarespace icon

Squarespace

A powerful wedding website builder for couples that need unique visual content and multiple customization options for their wedding website.
Wix icon

Wix

A top-rated wedding website builder that offers a rich library of design templates and wedding-specific features for greater creative control.
The Knot icon

The Knot

An excellent wedding party planning software that provides responsive features for managing your guest list and every aspect of the wedding.
WeddingWire icon

WeddingWire

A leading wedding website builder that assists with the planning process and links couples with the best local and international wedding vendors.
Joy icon

Joy

A mobile-friendly website builder with an AI-writing tool that offers features for sending invitations and reminders about the wedding date.

Our work is supported by affiliate commissions.

The wedding day is the ultimate dream of every couple. As exciting and sensational as a wedding is, planning for it can be very daunting. Bringing your idea of a dream wedding into reality requires days and weeks of rigorous planning and attention to detail.

Creating a website is an excellent way of keeping guests up-to-date and sharing relevant information about the upcoming wedding.

With plenty of wedding website builders available in the market, designing your dream wedding website doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

This article shows you how to create a wedding website to document your wedding planning process and save memories from the event.

Let’s dive in.

1. Determine the Purpose and Goals of Your Wedding Website

Every wedding website needs an intended purpose and goal. Setting the purpose and goals of your wedding website makes it easy to share information and determine the structure of your entire wedding site.

A wedding website, while announcing your big day, should provide information regarding all aspects of your wedding itinerary. While limiting information on a wedding website is important, it should provide relevant information about the event.

Do you want to collect RSVPs or provide vital details about the wedding? Clearly state the goal of your wedding website.

The goal of your website can be to provide information about your event, keep visitors informed about changes, or announce the color theme.

Other than giving a thorough summary of the wedding, a wedding website is an effective tool to announce the intended couple to wedding guests.

The average cost of a wedding by state
Source: Value Penguin

2. Choose a Wedding Website Builder

A wedding website builder is an effective tool to create an online presence for your special event.

While building a website serves different purposes, one of the main benefits of using a website builder is that it limits the need for hiring a web designer.

The cost of planning and hosting your dream wedding can be expensive. You have to consider top expenses like venue, catering, photography, videography, wedding rings, food, wedding planners, and lighting and decor.

Average cost of a wedding
Source: Money Geek

Using a website builder instead of hiring web designers is a cheap and convenient way of building an online presence for your wedding.

The best wedding website builders provide you with quality wedding website building tools and features. Wix, Squarespace, The Knot, WeddingWire, and Joy are the top wedding website builders, offering creativity and some of the best designs on the market.

These website-building platforms are easy to use and provide users with a huge amount of freedom to create their dream wedding. Some offer free plans and trials you can use to build a free wedding website.

The Knot is a stand-out wedding website builder, doubling as an online wedding planner to assist users in documenting their beautiful wedding.

How Tech is Being Used for Planning
Source: The Knot

3. Pick a Unique Domain Name

Every website requires a unique domain name that sets it apart from other sites. Domains are unique and specific to a particular user, which makes it easy for visitors to access and distinguish your wedding website from other wedding websites.

Your domain name should be short, memorable, straightforward, and reflective of your wedding.

Coming up with a beautiful domain name for your wedding site can be a tough task. Using the best domain name generators like FounderJar and Bluehost helps you easily find a short, unique, and catchy domain name that works for you.

FounderJar’s domain name generator uses an AI model that generates tons of quality domain name suggestions for users.

FounderJar’s domain name generator

The best website builders like Squarespace and Wix offer free domain names on their free plans. But if you want your site to have a unique and professional feel and stand out from other wedding websites, use a custom domain.

While a custom domain comes with extra cost, in the long run, the cost justifies the means. You get a unique name for your wedding website.

Your domain name should reflect your wedding hashtag, making it easy to link it to social media accounts and stand out when searched online.

Most Popular Top-Level Domains Worldwide

Share of Global TLD
Source: Statista

4. Choose and Personalize a Website Template

The website design is the primary focus of every wedding website. While accessibility boosts your website’s user experience, don’t rule out the role of aesthetics in attracting loads of visitors.

Designing a website is no easy task especially when you are doing it yourself. There are many different tools, features, and design options you have to consider when designing your wedding site.

Thankfully, website builders make designing a website easy even if they don’t have any web design experience. They provide ready-made templates you can choose from.

Think of website builders as a faster and more convenient way to save money and time while maintaining the intended purpose.

Although website templates are ready-made, customizing them helps give your site a distinct and personalized look. Your wedding website design should be a reflection of what your wedding is about, helping visitors have an idea of the wedding theme.

Squarespace, Wix, the Knot, WeddingWire, and Joy have some stunning wedding website templates to browse and preview for your site design.

After picking a wedding template that conforms with your wedding theme, the next step is to customize it, making it unique.

Choosing a unique color scheme, adding pre-wedding and post-wedding photos, and using bold fonts are the best ways to personalize a wedding website template.

Soria & Anthonie Website Template Example

Source: Squarespace Templates

Soria & Anthonie is a beautiful wedding website template created by Squarespace you can use as a model to build your own site. You can’t help but love the beautiful couple’s picture featuring green vegetation and a water body. 

I love how Soria & Anthonie displays key information about the wedding ceremony and reception including the time and the location. There is a special CTA button that links directly to the couples’ love story page.

Anna & Ryan Website Template Example
Source: Wix Templates

Anna & Ryan is one of the best wedding website templates you can use as inspiration to create your dream site. I love the use of colorful and adorable images of the couples to beautify the site.

There is a dedicated section just after the hero section for the couples’ love story. I love how the website displays vital wedding information like the date, venue, and how to get there.

5. Add The Wedding Details

Your wedding details are the main content of the website. Making this information easily accessible goes a long way in making your wedding website meet the intended target of informing visitors and guests.

Depending on what stage of the planning process you are in, your website can serve as a save-the-date mechanism to keep guests engaged.

Information such as the name of the couples, wedding venue details, and engagement photos, should be part of your wedding planning checklist. Adding images from your engagement shoot, Google Maps, and relevant pages are ways to make your wedding website fun for visitors.

Some important details to include in your wedding website:

1. A Countdown Timer

Keeping your guests engaged is one of the ways to keep your wedding event fun and catchy. Using a countdown keeps everyone engaged and raises excitement until the wedding day.

Apart from the excitement and buzz that comes with it, a countdown timer serves as a reminder. With the days counting down, guests get a reminder of D-day, keeping everyone organized and prepared.

2. The Couples’ Love Story/Journey

Your love story is an important wedding detail that every wedding website should have. Devote a separate section of your website to take visitors on a journey of your love story.

Stick to displaying images and unique fonts to help keep visitors engaged as they scroll through your well-documented love story.

3. The Dress Code

One important detail to spell out on a wedding website is the dress code. While the website needs to conform to the wedding style and color theme, it should provide details about the dress code. This information is important to help invited wedding guests prepare ahead of the date.

4. The Venue, Date, and Time

The time, date, and location are key details that should be accessible at a glance. You can go the extra mile in scheduling a whole itinerary for the whole day, keeping visitors expectant and fully booked.

Do you have different events planned to mark your wedding? Are there some events limited to only a category of people different from the general ones? Ensure you distinguish private events from general events to limit guests and prevent confusion at event venues.

5. A FAQ Page

The FAQ section is an important part of your wedding website that helps eliminate any potential confusion. Make it easier for wedding guests by providing ready answers to their potential questions in your FAQ section.

Include contact details on the FAQ page, helping people with easy access to much-needed information about the event.

6. Include An RSVP Form

An RSVP form is an optional part of a dream website. Most couples still prefer the traditional method of sending wedding invitations, which makes including an RSVP form redundant.

If you have a lot of guests on your invitation list, then handing out individual wedding invitations is a viable option.

While you cannot account for all your guests receiving their invitations via your website, RSVP forms help fill the gap. For the maximum effect, you can use a hybrid of the two. Displaying RSVP on your website comes with little or no added cost to sharing an RSVP form.

Including an online RSVP form in your wedding website is an effective way to automate your RSVPs, helping with the overall wedding planning.

The good thing about RSVP forms is that you can use them for different occasions because they are effective for other events. For your destination wedding, wedding registry, rehearsal dinner, and parties, an online RSVP form comes in handy in managing the numbers.

7. Include A Gift Registry

Including registry information on wedding invitations is considered bad etiquette. However, do not rule out the importance of a gift registry.

A gift registry is a tool to solicit specific donations and gifts from your guests, usually in the form of physical gifts and cash donations.

Gifts are one vital aspect of a wedding, an opportunity for guests to give back to the intending couples. While gifts should be thoughtful, help your guests streamline their options to specific items.

Calling everybody to inform them about the details of your wedding gift registry is nearly impossible and time-consuming.

You have to find a respectable way to include a gift registry in your wedding details. The best place to hint people toward the perfect present without sounding desperate is via your wedding website.

If you intend to accept cash donations rather than dwelling on physical gifts, then you need a unified platform to consolidate all donations.

Adding a link to a donation platform on your website is the easiest and most convenient way to receive donations from guests.

8. Password Protect Your Wedding Website

Security is one area that is important to guaranteeing that only invited guests have access to your wedding. Wedding crashing is becoming very popular, with couples left to account for more guests than they prepared to cater for.

While a wedding website is available on the general web, restricting it to only your hand picked guests is necessary to protect the identity of guests.

Limiting your wedding guests strictly by invitation helps prevent unwanted guests from gaining access and ruining your special day.

Password Protect Your Wedding Website
Source: Gitnux

The most effective way of securing your wedding website is to password protect it, helping to limit access to your wedding site. This step guarantees only guests with the password information have access to your wedding website.

You can be innovative about it by including the web address and password on your wedding invitations. This move helps limit access to your wedding site, keeping your wedding site and wedding day safe.

9. Optimize Your Wedding Website for Mobile Devices

Your wedding website design should accommodate mobile visitors, keeping in mind a large part of your target audience will access your site via their mobile devices.

A mobile-friendly website design helps accommodate a large percentage of your target audience, guaranteeing an optimal experience.

One of the best ways of optimizing your wedding website is to choose a responsive theme that automatically adjusts for different screen sizes. This web design tip ensures all your content displays optimally on desktop, tablet, and smartphone devices.

Simple navigation is one area to look out for in designing your wedding website, making it easy for your website to be accessible on mobile devices. Using touch-friendly features instead of complex navigation helps improve your site’s mobile experience.

Optimize Your Wedding Website for Mobile Devices
Source: MARTECH

10. Review and Test Your Wedding Website

Your wedding website is a preamble of your dream day and like that day, you need everything to come out perfect. With this in mind, your wedding website needs to be devoid of errors or glitches that discourage guests and affect your big day.

Like any big event, there needs to be proper rehearsal and behind-the-scenes reviews and tests conducted to ensure smooth sailing. Optimally test every aspect of your wedding website content to ensure no glitches or slow loading exist on the site.

Scrutinize text and website content against spelling and grammatical errors to ensure you don’t pass the wrong message to guests. If there are external links or forms attached to your website, ensure they are working correctly by test-running them ahead.

Images, videos, and large files affect a site’s loading time. Ensuring they are kept small guarantees a fast-loading experience.

If you intend to use videos and other interactive elements, test them ahead to ensure they work optimally without glitches or lag.

11. Share Your Wedding Website

Your wedding website should be easily accessible to your target audience. From your custom domain name, guests should have an idea of what to expect and the domain name needs to be specific to the wedding theme.

One of the most effective ways of making your wedding website easily accessible is by including it in your wedding invitations. Including a link to your website can be as easy as using a bespoke QR code that takes guests directly to the site upon scanning.

Wedding hashtags are a new trend for guests to share images from your wedding on their different social media accounts.

Using a trendy wedding hashtag serves as an effective tool to share your wedding website and encourage guests to share their wedding photos.

For example, #JimandPrecious is an example of a trendy hashtag that your guests can promote to generate engagement for your wedding.

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Martin Luenendonk

Editor at FounderJar

Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.