A wedding website has two jobs. The first is to answer guest questions before anyone has to ask them, so you aren’t replying to the same message about parking fourteen times in the month before the wedding. The second is to collect things from guests: RSVPs, meal choices, song requests, and later the photos they took on the day. Every section below earns its place by doing one of those two jobs. If you’re tempted to add something that does neither, it’s decoration, which is allowed, but it goes at the bottom.
Here’s the full checklist: the sections you need, what to write in each, the nice-to-haves, and what to leave off.
The essential sections
Your names, the date and a cover photo
Obvious, but worth stating because couples sometimes bury the date below a long introduction. A guest landing on your site should see who, when and where within a second of the page loading. One good photo of the two of you is enough for the top. An engagement shoot picture works, and so does a decent phone photo from a holiday. If you want to see how other couples have laid theirs out, there are example wedding websites you can click through.
The schedule
This is the section guests check most, usually from the back of a taxi. Give timings for the whole day, not just the ceremony. A typical UK running order looks something like this:
- 1.30pm – Guests arrive at the venue
- 2pm – Ceremony
- 2.45pm – Drinks reception and photos on the lawn
- 4.30pm – Wedding breakfast and speeches
- 7pm – Evening guests arrive
- 7.30pm – First dance, then the band
- 9pm – Evening food
- Midnight – Carriages
Two notes. First, tell guests to arrive at least half an hour before the ceremony; someone will still cut it fine, but fewer of them. Second, if you have evening-only guests, make their start time unmissable so nobody turns up during the speeches.
Venue and travel
Write this section for someone arriving in an unfamiliar town with a phone at 15% battery. Include:
- The venue’s full address with postcode, because that’s what goes in the satnav
- Parking: where it is, whether it’s free, and whether cars can be left overnight
- The nearest railway station and roughly how far it is from the venue
- One or two local taxi numbers, since rural venues are often outside app coverage and guests find this out at midnight
If the ceremony and reception are at different places, give directions between the two and say whether transport is provided.
RSVP
The section that does the most work. State the deadline clearly, ask for a yes or no per guest, and collect meal choices if you’re serving a plated meal. Add a yes/no flag for dietary requirements rather than a free-text box, and follow up with the guests who tick yes. An online RSVP saves you transcribing paper cards into a spreadsheet, and tools like Ode will show you who hasn’t replied yet, which matters more than you’d think when the caterer is waiting on final numbers.
Accommodation
List a few options at different prices: the hotel attached to the venue or nearest to it, a mid-range option in town, and a budget choice such as a Premier Inn or a decent B&B. Include rough prices per night and how far each is from the venue. If you’ve negotiated a room block, say the booking code and the date it expires. Guests travelling with children will quietly thank you for noting which options have family rooms.
Dress code
Keep it to one or two sentences, and be concrete. “Smart” on its own means different things to different generations, so add an example: “Jacket and tie, or whatever you’d wear to a nice dinner.” If the drinks reception is on grass, warn people about stiletto heels. If it’s a marquee in October, tell them to bring a layer. These small practical lines get more gratitude than any amount of styling advice.
FAQs
Every couple ends up answering the same handful of questions, so answer them once here:
- Is there parking? (Yes, even though it’s in the travel section. People look here first.)
- Are children invited? Be direct either way; ambiguity creates awkward phone calls.
- What’s the dress code? Repeat the one-liner.
- What time does it finish? Guests booking taxis and babysitters need this.
- Do you have a gift list? Point to the gifts section rather than answering at length here.
- Can I take photos during the ceremony? If you’re having an unplugged ceremony, this is where you say so.
The nice-to-haves
None of these are required, and a site with just the essentials above is a perfectly good wedding website. But each of these adds something if you have the patience.
- Your story. How you met, in a paragraph or two. Keep it short: guests who know you already know it, and the ones who don’t will want the gist, not the saga.
- Gift list or registry. A link to the registry, or a few lines about contributions to the honeymoon. British convention is to be slightly bashful here, and that’s fine. “Your presence is the present, but if you’d like to give something...” remains the standard formula because it works.
- A shared photo album. Somewhere guests can upload their photos from the day, usually via a QR code on the tables. This is the other half of the “collecting things” job, and wedding photo sharing is one of the features couples use most after the day itself.
- Music requests. A song request box on the RSVP feeds your playlist and tells you what kind of dance floor to expect.
- A guestbook. Messages from guests who can’t make it, or from everyone in the weeks before. They’re lovely to read later and take almost no effort to set up.
- A countdown. This one is pure decoration, but it’s mildly pleasing and takes seconds.
What to leave off
A wedding website is a link, and links get forwarded. Assume anything on the page could be read by a colleague of a guest, a plus-one you’ve never met, or a stranger. With that in mind:
- Anything you’d mind a stranger reading. Home addresses, the honeymoon dates if your house will be empty, anything financially specific.
- Registry prices. Link to the list, but don’t reproduce items with prices on your own site. It reads as an invoice.
- In-jokes. A reference only your university friends understand makes everyone else feel like they’re at the wrong wedding. Save them for the speeches, where at least someone can explain.
- The full guest list. Some couples list who’s coming. Don’t: it invites comparison, exposes who declined, and becomes wrong the moment someone drops out.
Should you password-protect it?
There are cases for it, but fewer than couples assume. A password makes sense if you’re publishing details you genuinely want kept private, if either of you has a public-facing job, or if you simply don’t like the idea of the page being findable. The cost is real, though: a password is one more thing for guests to mislay, and the people most likely to be defeated by it are the older relatives who most need the information. If everything on the site is stuff you’d happily say out loud at the pub, skip the password and keep the site off search engines instead, which Ode does by default.
Keep it updated
A wedding website is only trustworthy if it’s current. When the ceremony time moves by half an hour or the venue changes its parking arrangements, update the site the same day, because guests will act on whatever it says. Put the site live early (with the save-the-dates, ideally) and add detail as you confirm it; our UK wedding website timeline covers when each section needs to be ready. The couples whose guests turn up on time, in the right clothes, with their RSVPs in weeks early, are mostly just the couples who wrote things down in one place and kept that place accurate.