What to put on your wedding website (and what to leave off)

A wedding website needs six things: the date and ceremony time, the venue and how to get there, where to stay, the dress code, a schedule of events, and an RSVP. Everything else (the proposal story, the gallery, the bios) is optional, and most of it is read by almost nobody.

The reason this list stays short is that guests do not browse a wedding website. They arrive with a specific question, find the answer or fail to, and leave. The most common questions are logistical, and they are the same questions at nearly every wedding. A site that answers those six well outperforms a beautiful one that buries them.

What to put on your wedding website

• The four anchor facts. Date, ceremony start time, city and venue, dress code. Put them where a guest can read them without scrolling. Every other section is a footnote to these.
• One schedule, in order. Welcome drinks, ceremony, reception, next-morning brunch, with arrival times. A guest planning a flight home is reading this section, not your color palette.
• A real travel page. Airport, drive time, hotel block with the booking code and cutoff date, parking, and the shuttle plan. Name the road, name the lot, give the code.
• Dress code in a full sentence. "Black tie optional: the ceremony is on grass, so consider block heels." Two clauses, and nobody has to text your mother.
• An RSVP built for a phone. Invitation code, household roster, yes or no per event, submit. Optional dietary and song fields underneath, never as a blocker.
• A short FAQ. Plus-ones, children, parking, rain plan, gift preferences. Five to seven questions: the ones you would otherwise answer by text, twelve times.

What to leave off

Every section you ship is a section you maintain. The week before the wedding (when the shuttle time moves and the brunch venue changes) you will be grateful the site is small.

• A photo gallery before the wedding. Engagement galleries slow the page and push the schedule below the fold. Save the gallery for after, when there is something guests actually want to look through.
• Wedding party bios. Written for the wedding party, read by the wedding party. If you want to honor them, do it in the program or a toast.
• A countdown timer. It creates urgency for a date the guest cannot act on. The RSVP deadline is the only date that needs a deadline treatment.
• Autoplaying music. Half your guests are opening the site at work or on a train. The other half are on a subway platform. Nobody has ever been won over by it.
• A password guests have to remember. Sometimes justified, usually not. We wrote about the tradeoff separately: the short version is that every extra step costs RSVPs.

The order guests read it in

Watch how people actually use one of these sites and a pattern shows up fast. First visit: date, place, dress code. Second visit, usually weeks later: RSVP. Third visit, the week of: schedule and travel. Build for those three visits and the structure writes itself: anchor facts on top, RSVP one tap away, schedule and travel deep enough to be useful.

That is also the argument against a sprawling site. A guest who has to hunt for the shuttle time on the morning of the wedding will text you instead, and you will be getting your photograph taken.

A note on tone

Plain sentences beat clever ones here. "The ceremony begins at four; the gates open at three-thirty" is hospitality. "Join us as we begin our forever" is decoration. You can have both, but the decoration should never be load-bearing.

If you want the full build order, our twelve-item wedding website checklist walks through it step by step, and building a wedding website guests actually use covers the editorial side. The live demo shows how the six sections fit together on a phone.

Common questions

What should be on a wedding website?

Date, ceremony time and location, dress code, travel and lodging, a schedule of events, and an RSVP. Those six answer nearly every question a guest will have. Everything else is optional.

Do we need to include our proposal story?

Only if you want to write it. Guests rarely arrive at a wedding website to read a narrative. They arrive with a logistical question. If you include it, put it on its own page rather than above the schedule.

Should the registry be on the wedding website?

Yes, on its own page, linked from a small labeled section. Registries belong on the site because guests look for them there. They do not belong on the home screen.

How much detail should the travel section have?

Enough that a guest flying in can book without texting you: nearest airport, realistic drive time, the hotel block name and code, and whether there is a shuttle. Vague travel copy generates the most messages of any section.

Is it rude to put 'adults only' on a wedding website?

No, as long as it is stated once, plainly, and in the same place as the other guest-list details. What reads as rude is burying it, or letting a guest discover it after they have arranged childcare.