The short answer is YES! Whenever I’m asked this question, I encourage my clients to go ahead and set up a wedding website. It’s not hard to do, and it’s a very useful repository of information for your guests. Being able to find all the relevant wedding information in one, easy-to-access place is very convenient.

What goes on the site?

• Information about the wedding: location of ceremony and reception, addresses, and special notes. Maybe your ceremony will be on the lawn and you want to warn women to wear wedge heels rather than stilettos. Perhaps the air conditioning will be blasting all night and guests will want to bring a wrap or a sweater. Anything they need to know can go in this section.

• Travel information: airport and car rental availability, descriptions and links to hotels near the wedding location (whether or not you’ve set up room blocks), an embedded map link so guests can easily see the surrounding area.

• Things to do: what would you recommend to out-of-towners? Are there wineries or breweries to visit? A local zoo or aquarium? Kid-friendly activities? Your guests are coming for the wedding, but there’s a lot of time in a weekend that won’t be spent at the wedding, so help them find something to do.

• Photos and write-up of the couple: how did you meet, what was the proposal like, what are your plans post-wedding? This is a great way to show off your engagement photos!

• Photos and write-up of the wedding party members: how do you know them, why are they special to you, what do you want people to know about them? You can even include photos of you and/or your fiancé(e) with each person, if you have them.

• RSVP option: a time-saver for you and your guests! No more waiting for the unreliable post office to deliver mailed response cards. You also won’t have to enter RSVP and meal selection information into your spreadsheet if your website is already keeping track of it. Some tech-forward couples are doing away with the paper response card altogether and only having online RSVPs. This saves money (as well as trees) because you don’t have to pay for the response cards and envelopes or for postage. (Remember, you’re supposed to pre-stamp the return envelope for the response card.)

• Registry information and links! This might be the single most useful feature of a wedding website. If you’ve registered at two or three stores, your guests will have to go to the website for each store, find their “Registry” link, input one of your names, then select the correct registry information. You save everyone a lot of hassle by putting the information right there on your website with a link that will take guests directly to your registry. Done and done!

Where can you create a wedding website?

Lots of places! The Knot and WeddingWire both offer free wedding websites as part of their service. Zola.com is another option, both for registering and for creating a site. If you order your invitations from Minted.com, they have website templates to match their invitation designs! They offer a free version, but if you want a custom URL (without minted.us as part of it) the fee is only $20.

You can also use a more traditional website builder platform like Squarespace or Wix. These sites aren’t free, but you will get far more features and functionality with them. And you don’t need to know how to program to use them. This very website is hosted on Squarespace, and I can’t write code to save my life.

Lastly, consider Wordpress.com if you’re interested in doing a more blogger-style website. This is the approach I took when I got married. Most of my family and friends lived far away from me, and I wanted them to be able to share in the wedding planning process with me. So I wrote posts with photos at each milestone along the way—venue shopping, dress shopping, cake tasting, registering, etc. It was a fun way to keep everyone in the loop. Plus, we also had all that info mentioned above on there.

How do you let people know about your wedding website?

The best way is to put it on your save-the-date card/magnet/email—whatever format you’re using to get the word out that you are getting married. Save-the-dates are typically sent 6-8 months before the wedding, so your website may not be complete at that point, but guests can follow along as you add more information throughout the planning process.

If you’re not sending save-the-dates, you can include an insert with your invitation providing the URL for your wedding website. I don’t recommend putting the website URL on the invitation itself, because you want to keep the invitation elegant, and website URLs are kind of the opposite of elegant. But a matching insert card is a classy way of conveying the information.

On the other hand, if you’re having a bridal shower, those invitations are the perfect place to list your wedding website! Guests will want to know where you’re registered, and they’ll know that the website is where they can find that information.

And if none of those options works for you, then there’s always good old email or word of mouth to let people know about the site.

Don’t feel discouraged by the prospect of setting up a wedding website if you’re not “techy.” Most of these platforms have made it as simple as possible for you to create a site. And if you have a full-service wedding planner, this is definitely something she should be able to help you with. I manage wedding websites for all my full-service clients.

So I definitely recommend having a wedding website because they’re easy to set up, they’re super convenient for your guests, and they’re mostly free!

TL;DR here’s a video link

This post was written by Sacramento wedding planner Risa Weaver-Enion. If you're feeling overwhelmed by planning your wedding, we are here to help! Read more about what we do on our Welcome and Packages pages. Email risa@risajamesevents.com if you have questions or want to inquire about getting help with wedding planning. And if you'd like to have future blog posts delivered to your inbox, please join our Insider’s Club on the Welcome page.