When to Make Your Wedding Website (and What Actually Goes On It)

Here is a piece of data nobody collects but every wedding proves: the single most common moment a guest visits your wedding website is the night before the wedding, on their phone, in a hotel room, looking for one specific fact. Design for that moment and everything else about the website gets simple.

First, timing. Put the site up once the venue and date are locked, which for most couples is somewhere around eight to six months out, and definitely before save-the-dates go out, because the save-the-date is what carries the link. Before that, there is nothing to say. After that, every week without a site is a week of the same six questions arriving by text.

Because that is the real job of a wedding website: it is a shield against repeated questions. Every fact you publish is fifty texts you will not receive. With that lens, the contents write themselves.

What goes on: the date, the venue name and full address, and the ceremony start time, above the fold, no scrolling, no entering a password to learn what day the wedding is. The schedule in plain terms, when doors open, when the ceremony starts, roughly when it ends. Travel and lodging, with the hotel block name and code if you have one. The dress code, in actual words a human can act on, because "festive garden formal" has caused more panic than any seating chart. The RSVP, if you are collecting them digitally. And the registry link, which guests genuinely want and which is somehow still treated as gauche to display; put it there, everyone is relieved.

What to skip: the twelve-paragraph love story nobody reads past your mothers, the password gate that locks your aunt out at midnight, the countdown widget, the guestbook, and anything that requires guests to create an account. Your website is not a scrapbook and it is not an app. It is a beautifully dressed FAQ.

A note on looks, because this is the one part of planning where taste is nearly free. The site should feel like the wedding: same tones, same mood, your names in a typeface that does not fight the invitation. That coherence costs nothing and reads as care. What you should not do is spend a weekend fighting a website builder for it. This is a two-hour task, not a two-weekend one; pick a tool that makes the elegant version the default and move on to decisions that matter more. Building calm little wedding sites is part of what I do at Altessa, so I have opinions, but whatever tool you use, the two-hour rule stands.

One last thing while you have the tab open: check the site on a phone, because that hotel-room guest the night before is on one. If the address is findable in five seconds in bad lighting after a long flight, your website has done its entire job.

A wedding website succeeds the way good hosting always succeeds: quietly, by answering the question before it gets asked.

Armin Korsos is a filmmaker who spent nine years shooting weddings before building Altessa (altessa.studio), an all-in-one wedding planning workspace that replaces the spreadsheet.