What to write on your wedding website: a checklist

Choosing the design took ten minutes. Then you opened the first empty box, the one labelled invitation message, and you have been looking at it for four days.

Below is every section of a wedding website, what it is for, what to put in it, and starter text you can copy and change. The order is roughly the order a guest reads in, and it maps onto the boxes you fill when you build one with us.

Your names on a wedding website, and how to write them

First names only. The surnames go in the families section, where they belong, and a cover carrying four names looks like a legal document.

Pick a spelling and hold it everywhere. If your name has two accepted spellings, and most of ours do, choose the one that will be on the printed card and use it on the website, the link, the hashtag and the share preview. A guest who searches for Ankita and finds Ankitha assumes they have the wrong wedding.

Order matters less than consistency, but decide it once. Whichever name goes first on the cover should go first everywhere else, including the address of your site.

The invitation line

One short paragraph that says who is inviting, and to what. It is the box people leave for last, and the first thing the older half of your guest list will actually read.

The decision is whose voice it is in. If your parents are hosting, as they usually are, let the line say so. The version where the couple invites everyone in their own voice reads modern and lands badly with a lot of elders, who will read the absence of the families as a statement.

If your family follows a particular form, there are longer examples of invitation wording by tradition to start from instead.

Families, and the sign-off at the end

Getting a parent's name wrong on an invitation is not a typo. It is a story your family tells at weddings for the next fifteen years. This section deserves more care than the photos and gets less.

Ask each set of parents how they write their own names, in writing, and copy it exactly. Not what you call them. Not what is on the PAN card. The form they use on invitations: Mr and Mrs, or Shri and Smt, with or without the middle name, with the honorific your family actually uses. Send the draft to one parent on each side before you publish and let them correct it.

For a parent who has passed away, the convention in most families is to keep the name and mark it, usually as Late Shri or Late Smt. Do not decide this on your own. Ask whoever is senior in that family which form they use, because the alternative, leaving the name out to avoid the question, is the version that hurts.

Grandparents are optional and worth including when they are alive and involved. Seeing their own name on their grandchild's invitation matters more to them than any design choice you will agonise over. Our families section has a grandparents block you can switch on.

Then the sign-off at the end of the invitation, which is where the phone numbers go. Not yours. You will be unreachable for three days and asleep for two of them. Put one number per side, belonging to a brother, a cousin or an uncle who has agreed to it out loud, and label who they are so a guest knows which one to ring about the Delhi bus and which one about the hotel.

The events, which is the part guests actually use

Everything else on your website is read once. This section is opened in the car, in the lift, and at the venue gate.

Every function needs five things, and most invitations ship missing the fifth.

The timing trap. Everyone knows the printed time is not the real time, so guests apply their own correction and arrive an hour late, which means you print an earlier time, which means they correct harder. It escalates every wedding season.

Break it by writing one honest line instead of playing with the number. Print the time you want people seated, then add a sentence saying what happens when. Something like: the baraat leaves the hotel at 7, so please be at the venue by 6:45. Guests follow a reason. They do not follow a number.

Parking is the thing nobody asks about until they are circling the block for the second time. One line per venue. Where to leave the car, whether there is valet, and whether the main gate closes at some point in the evening.

Dress code needs words, not only a swatch. Ours lets you write your own name against each colour you pick, and it is worth doing, because sage means about five different things and nobody wants to be the one in the wrong green. Name the colour, then say what the clothes have to survive: dancing, an outdoor lawn in December, a temple floor.

Picking the colours themselves is a whole argument of its own, and there are worked examples in dress code wording and colours.

Our story, without being nauseating

Three short beats. How you met, one thing that is genuinely specific, and how the decision got made. That is the whole section, and it should be shorter than your events list.

What ruins it is adjectives about each other. Kind, caring, my best friend, my rock. Every couple writes these and no reader gets anything from them, because they describe a feeling rather than a person.

What saves it is one detail only the two of you would bother to include. The wrong train. The dog. The four hours stuck on the Outer Ring Road. Your friends will screenshot exactly one line from this section and send it to each other, and it will be the concrete one.

If you cannot write it, do not force it. An invitation with no story section is fine. An invitation with a bad story section is the thing people quote back to you.

Guest information, written for the people flying in

Local guests need almost none of this. Out of town guests need all of it, and they need it before they book, not the week before the wedding.

Be specific with the numbers you actually know and silent about the ones you do not. "The airport is nearby" helps nobody. "About 40 minutes, longer on a Friday evening" is a sentence somebody can plan a flight around.

Cards worth writing: travel, where to stay, parking, getting around if there is a shuttle, weather, and whether children are welcome. That last one gets left out and then asked repeatedly, and the answer changes how a whole family plans its trip.

Photos, and how many is too many

Four in the gallery, which is what ours caps it at, plus your cover photo. More than that and the page gets slow on the 3G a relative is using in a hill station, which is a real constraint and not a design preference.

The harder rule is that they should be different from each other. Four photos from the same shoot, same outfit, same background, are one photo shown four times. Aim for one of you both looking at the camera, one candid, one with family in it, and one of the place if people are travelling to somewhere they have never been.

Keep your best photo off the gallery. Put it on the cover, in a portrait crop, because that is the image doing all the work: it is the first thing a guest sees and it is what shows up in WhatsApp when your link is forwarded.

The RSVP ask

Ask one question that a family of five can answer. "Will you join us?" cannot be answered by a household, which is who your invitation actually went to, so ask how many of them are coming.

Give the date a reason. A deadline with a consequence attached to it gets replies, and a bare date does not. And do not bury the ask behind everything else you wrote. A guest who decided in the first ten seconds should not have to read your whole story before they can say yes.

Replies are the hard part rather than the asking, and there is more on getting guests to RSVP once the invitation is out.

The link preview, which everybody forgets

Before anyone sees a single thing you wrote, they see a card in a WhatsApp chat: an image, a title and a line of text. That card decides whether the link gets opened or scrolled past, and it is editable.

Put your names and the date in the title. Not "Wedding Invitation", which is what a hundred other forwards in the same family group already say. The line underneath should tell someone what tapping gets them.

The rest of that first message matters too, and sending a wedding invitation on WhatsApp covers what to write around the link.

Before you send your wedding website

Read the whole thing on a phone, out loud, at the speed a person actually reads. You will catch three things immediately: a sentence that is too long, a time that is wrong, and a name spelled two ways.

Then send it to one parent from each side and ask them to check only the names, dates and phone numbers. Not the design. If you ask about the design you will get notes about the design.