The best wedding websites answer every question a guest might plausibly ask, and not a single one they wouldn't. Most sites fail in one direction or the other: either they're so sparse guests still email the couple asking where to park, or they're so stuffed with the couple's love story that the actual details are buried between a childhood photo carousel and a quiz about how you met.
Here's the middle: what actually belongs on the page.
The essentials (skip these and guests will email you)
Five pieces of information are non-negotiable. If your site doesn't have them, you haven't finished building it.
- The date. Spelt out (Saturday 14 September 2026), not just 14.9.26, which half your guests will misread.
- The ceremony venue and start time. Full address, postal code, and a map link guests can open on their phone.
- The reception venue, if different. Including whether there's transport between the two.
- An RSVP form with a clear deadline. Meal choices and dietary requirements collected here save you three weeks of emails.
- A dress code. "Smart" is not a dress code. "Cocktail" is. Be specific or guests will default to whatever they wear to their own family weddings, which may not be what you had in mind.
The genuinely useful
Once the essentials are done, these additions prevent the most common guest questions:
- Travel and accommodation, how to get there, recommended hotels nearby, rough rates, and any room blocks you've arranged.
- A full-day schedule, ceremony, drinks, dinner, speeches, first dance, and when it ends. Guests with small children or long drives home need to know when the evening winds down.
- Parking and arrival details. One sentence saves fifteen emails.
- Weather notes for outdoor elements. "Bring a pashmina, we're outside for cocktails" is kinder than a group of guests shivering in sundresses.
- Contact info for someone other than you. The best man, a coordinator, or a wedding friend who can field questions on the day.
The thoughtful extras
These aren't required, but they lift a functional wedding site into a memorable one:
- A short version of your story. Two paragraphs, not eight. Where you met, when you knew, maybe one photo.
- A song playlist guests can press play on, Spotify embeds work beautifully on most wedding sites.
- A gift registry or honeymoon fund. Modern registries use direct payment links (Revolut, Wise, PayPal, bank transfer) with no platform fees, every penny lands in your account.
- A guestbook that accepts messages before and during the day. Works better than a paper book on a wobbly table.
- Your shared photo album linked from the site, with a QR code on the menu so guests can find it, the candids your photographer can't capture.
What to skip
Some things feel obligatory on wedding sites but actively waste space:
- A timeline of your relationship with dated photos. Lovely in a scrapbook, tedious on a wedding site.
- Long biographies of the wedding party. Guests know them or will meet them, and the ones who don't aren't going to read 400 words on the best man.
- "How we met" trivia quizzes. Nobody has ever taken one.
- Playlists that autoplay. Beautiful when guests choose to press play; an unwelcome surprise at 11pm in a quiet room.
What to keep off the page
Treat anything on your wedding site as something a stranger could read. Your home address, guests' contact details and anything you would not pin to a noticeboard belong in a private message, not on the site. That matters most if your wedding is being shared on social media, where a link travels further than you meant it to.
Keep the link itself close. Send it to your guests directly, on the invitation or by message, rather than posting it publicly, and check that your site is unlisted and not indexed by search engines. On When Will You Marry that is how every site starts: it stays out of search results and our public directory unless you choose to list it. Unlisted is not the same as locked, though: anyone your guests forward the link to can open it, so keep the page to details you would be comfortable with anyone reading.
The hierarchy that works
On the homepage, guests should be able to answer three questions in under ten seconds: when, where, and how to RSVP. Everything else, travel, dress code, schedule, your story, the registry, sits one click below on dedicated pages or collapsible sections.
That structure is the entire difference between a wedding site that gets used and one where guests still email you to ask what time the ceremony is.
Build it sooner than you think
You don't need all your details to launch, and you don't need to have settled on how it looks either, pick a template and change the colours and fonts whenever you like, without touching a word of the content. Start with the date, venue, and a rough schedule; fill in the rest as you lock suppliers and menus. A half-built site guests can already use is far more useful than a perfect site you haven't shared yet. The basics take about five minutes to set up.