Wedding website or invitation: what goes where

The convention is a printed invitation for the ceremony and a website for everything else. It works, and it exists because paper cannot be edited and there is a great deal of information that changes.

What is worth questioning is whether you need two things at all, because the reason for the split was a limitation of paper rather than a rule about invitations.

The two jobs#

An invitation asks a question: will you come. It is read once, carefully, usually with somebody else, and it is where the decision is made.

A website answers questions: where do I park, what do I wear, which hotel, is there a bus at midnight. It is read repeatedly, in small pieces, usually by one person on a phone in a hurry.

The mistake is putting the answers in the question. An invitation carrying nine paragraphs of parking information stops being an invitation.

What goes on the invitation#

Everything a guest needs in order to answer.

• Who is inviting them
• Who is invited, by name
• The date, and the day of the week
• The start time and roughly when it ends
• Where, with enough of an address to judge the journey
• The dress code
• Anything that changes the decision: children, plus ones, an overnight stay
• How to reply, and by when

That is the whole list. If a line does not affect whether somebody says yes, it does not belong on the invitation.

What goes somewhere it can change#

• Travel, parking, taxi numbers
• Hotel blocks and codes
• The running order of the day
• Gift information, if it is more than a sentence
• Anything about the weather, the ground, the shoes
• The playlist request, the photograph policy, the bar

All of it useful, none of it needed to answer the question.

Why most couples only need one#

The split assumes the invitation is a fixed object. If the invitation is a link, it is not: the same address a guest was sent in March can carry the running order in September, and a change of venue rewrites itself for everybody who has ever opened it.

So the practical answer for many couples is one link with two layers. The invitation at the top, the detail below it, and the whole thing reopenable from the message it arrived in. The complete guide to digital invitations covers the format itself.

What that removes is the most common failure in the two document approach: a guest who has the invitation, cannot find the website, and messages you instead.

When a separate website is genuinely worth it#

• A destination day. There is simply more information, and much of it is not yours: flights, transfers, three days of events
• A weekend rather than a day. Multiple events with their own guest lists
• A large family day with real complexity. Accommodation for forty, shuttles, several venues

Even then, the invitation stays the invitation. The website is the appendix and it should never be where the date lives.

Two rules if you do have both#

First, never put information that affects the decision only on the website. Half your guests will not open it, and an adults only rule discovered on the day is your problem rather than theirs.

Second, put the address of the website on the invitation in a form somebody can actually use. Not a QR code alone, and not a long address with a hyphen in it that has to be typed. If you are using a code, QR codes on wedding stationery covers where they help and where they do not.

The test#

Read your invitation and ask whether a guest could answer yes or no with only what is on it. If they could, it is doing its job. If they need to look something up first, that thing belongs on the invitation and something else on it does not.

The full line by line version is in wedding invitation wording.