A wedding website costs a UK couple anywhere from nothing to a few hundred pounds. The realistic bands in 2026: free on the big platforms and on free plans like ours; £15 to £65 as a one-off on Ode’s paid plans; roughly £10 to £30 a month on a general website builder such as Squarespace or Wix for as long as the site is up; and several hundred pounds if a designer builds something custom. The interesting part isn’t the numbers, it’s what each price actually buys and what funds the free ones, so here is the honest breakdown.
Free: what pays for it
Hitched, Joy, Zola and The Knot all offer genuinely free wedding websites with no catch for your bank account. The catch is the business model: Hitched and The Knot are funded by suppliers paying to advertise to you, and Joy and Zola by guests buying registry gifts the platform sells. None of that is sinister, and for many couples it’s a fair trade. But it shapes the product: the free website exists to bring you to the directory or the registry, and the page your guests see is part of that machine. Our UK builder roundup goes platform by platform.
Free plans on paid products are the other kind of free: a smaller version of the real thing, funded by the couples who upgrade. Ode’s free plan is a real published website with RSVPs, meal choices and a small photo album, sized for a small wedding (30 RSVP replies, 20 photos), with no card and no trial expiry.
One-off pricing: £15 to £65
Ode’s paid plans are a single payment for the one event: Starter at £15, Plus at £35 and Complete at £65, adding more photos, a longer album window, the guestbook, the seating planner, music requests and the catering export as you go up. There is no subscription, so nothing keeps billing after the wedding and nothing needs cancelling. The pricing page has the complete matrix of what each plan includes, and prices are correct as of October 2026.
If you’d rather not build it at all, there’s also a set-up-for-you service at £149 where we build the site, RSVP and guest list from what you send us.
Subscriptions: the cost that keeps going
A general builder (Squarespace, Wix and friends) typically charges monthly. The build quality can be lovely and the design freedom is unmatched, but two costs hide in it: the subscription runs for as long as the page is up, which for a site published with the save-the-dates a year out means twelve-plus months of billing, and the wedding features aren’t there, so RSVPs, meal choices and seating become forms and plug-ins you assemble and test yourself. Budget the time as well as the money.
The costs that hide in the small print
Custom domains
A yourname.com address costs extra everywhere it’s offered: domain registration plus, on some platforms, a paid tier to connect it. It’s also the single most skippable cost on this page. Guests open whatever link you send them, and a QR code on the invitation doesn’t care how long the URL is.
Paper add-ons
Platforms that sell stationery price the website low and the matching paper suite high. Nothing wrong with beautiful paper, but compare it against an independent printer before assuming the bundle is a deal.
Your data after the wedding
Not a cost in pounds, but worth a line: on free platforms the page and its data tend to stay up indefinitely unless you remember to delete them. Ode works the other way and deletes guest data after the wedding on a published schedule. Decide which you prefer before you pick, not after.
What we’d actually budget
- Small wedding, no meal choices: £0. A free plan or a free platform does the whole job.
- Typical UK wedding with a sit-down meal: £15 to £65 once, or free on an ad- or registry-funded platform if that trade suits you.
- Design-led couple who want full control: £10 to £30 a month on a general builder, plus your evenings.
- No time at all: a set-up service or a designer, from about £150 to many hundreds.
Whichever band you land in, the money matters less than publishing early enough to be useful. Here’s how to build one for free this evening, and when each piece should go live.