One page your guests open,
instead of asking you again.

A wedding website is the place a guest looks instead of texting you. Your cousin wants to know whether to go straight to the venue or to the ceremony first, it is twenty past ten on a Tuesday, and she would rather not ring you about it. If there is a page, she looks. If there is not, you get the message, and then the same question, differently phrased, from eleven other people.

The second thing it does matters more as the months go on. Say ninety people are invited. Move the ceremony half an hour later and the printed card is wrong for good, the group chat has to be re-read by everyone in it, and the people who were away that week still arrive at the old time. A page is one edit. The invitation is a live link, so a guest who opened it in March and opens it again in July sees the current version, not the one you sent.

It is worth saying what the page is not. It is not a portfolio, and nobody reads how the two of you met. Guests open it standing at a bus stop with one hand, looking for a time and an address. Treat it as a working document that happens to look like you, and it will do its job.

The decision that shapes everything else comes before the first click: one page or several? On a laptop a menu of six looks organised. On a phone, where nearly every guest opens it, each tab is a small decision, and a guest who has to decide six times before finding the ceremony time gives up and texts you, which is the thing you were trying to prevent.

For most weddings, one page a guest scrolls beats a menu they have to navigate. The order does the work the menu would have done: date and place at the top, then the schedule, then the questions everyone asks, then the reply form at the bottom, where somebody has just finished reading the reasons to reply. If the page runs long, a row of jump links at the top gives you the navigation without the dead ends.

Several pages earn their place when there are genuinely several events: a dinner on the Friday and a ceremony on the Saturday, or two hundred people at the ceremony and forty who stay for the meal. That is also where separate replies matter. A guest can be asked about the ceremony, the dinner and the after-party as three questions rather than one, and a part can be kept invisible to the guests who were not invited to it, so nobody reads about a dinner they are not at.

Work in this order and you will not have to go back: choose the look, put in the date and the place, write the schedule, add the questions guests will ask, attach the RSVP, then share the link. The look comes first because it sets the tone of everything you write afterwards; choose it late and you reread every line to see whether it still fits. The link comes last for a plainer reason: a page that goes out before the reply form works collects nothing, and you cannot un-send it.

What goes on the page is a subject of its own, written out in full elsewhere. Our guide to what belongs on a wedding website takes the schedule, directions and arrival, places to stay, the dress code and the Q&A section in order, with the wording. Use that as the contents list and this article as the method.

Give the reply form more thought than the rest, because it is the only part that has to produce something. Ask whether they are coming, how many of them, the names of anyone they are bringing, what they would like to eat and anything they cannot eat, and leave a box for a message, because people write one and you will be glad of it later. Then stop. Every extra field is another question ninety people have to read, and the ones answering on a train put the phone down. The online RSVP page shows what the form collects and how the answers come back to you.

Before the link goes anywhere, open the page on your own phone the way a guest would, send a reply under a made-up name, check that it lands in your list with the right party size, then delete it. Give the link to one honest friend and ask what they could not find; the answer will be something you stopped seeing three drafts ago.

A good link is short, says who it is for, and survives being read out loud. Two first names, or a surname and a year, is nearly always enough. What to avoid: dates written with slashes, the nickname only the two of you use, hyphens in places nobody will guess, and anything that has to be spelled letter by letter to an aunt writing it on the back of an envelope.

That test is worth two minutes. Say the address across a room and ask someone to type what they heard. You will read it aloud more often than you expect: to the guest who rings on the Thursday, and off the back of an order of service.

For anything printed, use the QR code rather than the address. It goes on the invitation card, on the order of service, on a small card on the table at the reception, and it opens the same page with the same reply form, so a paper guest and a phone guest end up on the same list. Print it large enough to scan in low light, keep a plain background behind it, and test it on two phones before the cards go to the printer.

A page on the web is on the open internet unless something stops it. That is not a warning, it is simply the default, and most tools give you a switch. For a wedding the useful setting is the quiet one: the page opens for anyone holding the link and does not ask search engines to list it. Nobody but your guests needs to find you by typing two first names into a search box.

Then there is what you publish, which no setting protects. Keep your home address off the page. If people ask where to send something, ask them to message you and answer each one privately. The same goes for other people's phone numbers and any arrangement about gifts you would not want a stranger reading. A page that is unlisted but says where you live has not really been made private.

Photographs of children need the parent's yes, every time, and it is far easier to ask beforehand than to take a picture down afterwards. The same applies to whatever guests add themselves: a guest book where you approve a note before other guests see it means the page cannot embarrass you on the one day you are not looking at it.

The link goes in three places. On the invitation itself, so the object that announces the wedding also answers the questions about it. In the message that carries the invitation, as the last line rather than buried in the middle. And on the day, on the order of service or a table card, for the guest who wants to know when the speeches start. If your invitation is digital, the link is the invitation and there is nothing else to send.

Some relatives will not open a link, and there is no version of this where you win that argument. Print the half that matters to them, which is the date, the place and how to reply, on a card with the QR code in the corner for whoever sits next to them. Then ring them, ask the questions the form asks, and put the answer on the list yourself. Two phone calls is a smaller job than a guest list with a hole in it.

Whatever you do, keep to one page and one address. A second page made in a hurry for the people who could not find the first one is how two versions of the ceremony time end up in circulation.

Three things change after the link goes out, and they are the same three at nearly every wedding: the schedule moves, the hotel you recommended fills up, and the reply deadline arrives. Each one is a paragraph to edit rather than a message to ninety people, and taking the first option is the entire reason for having a page.

So when the running order firms up, put the real times in and take out the approximate ones. When the hotel has no rooms left, say so and name another, or every guest travelling in does that hour of research separately, and three of them ring you about it. When the deadline passes, change "please let us know by the fourteenth" to a line saying replies have closed and asking anyone who has not answered to call. That single edit does more than another round of reminders.

A fortnight before the deadline, the useful object is not the number of replies. It is the list of people who have not sent one. Message those guests directly, by name, about their own reply. A general reminder to everybody is read by the people who already answered and ignored by the ones who did not.

The page has a second life, and it asks almost nothing of you. Guests take several hundred photographs between them and every one is stuck on somebody's phone. A gallery on the page they already have the link to is the only place all of them will land. Ask once at the end of the night and again the next morning, and they arrive while the photographer is still editing.

The guest book is the other half of it. Notes people write on the night, and the messages that came in with the replies months earlier, are the raw material for the thank-you cards, and they save you starting each one on a blank page. Keep the guest list too. It is now the address book you write those cards from, with everybody's name spelled correctly on it.

When it is over, change the top of the page from what is happening to thank you, and leave it up for a few months while the photographs come in. Then take down anything you would not want online indefinitely, meaning addresses, phone numbers and arrangements about gifts, and keep the rest for as long as you like. Nobody is going to look at it except the two of you, which is rather the point.